FIFA World Cup 2026

F-22Raptor said:
Excited to see if the US can keep its great form in tomorrow’s game against Australia.
Click to expand...
US matches well with teams like Australia, Mexico, Japan and South American nations that aren't Brazil or Argentina. US struggles with teams that are physical the fast and big players which is most of the Euro teams and Brazil-Argentina which are fast/big-ish but very physical. If our best athletes played soccer instead of NFL or NBA we'd dominate the sport. :cry:
 
Canada and Switzerland could be very sneaky and just go for a draw in the last game to guarantee they both qualify.
 
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New Zealand's Sarpreet Singh proud to blaze a trail for Sikh community at World Cup​


Reuters
June 19, 2026

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New Zealand's Sarpreet Singh in action with Iran's Milad Mohammadi in Los Angeles Stadium, Inglewood, California, US, June 15, 2026. —Reuters

New Zealand midfielder Sarpreet Singh hopes his appearance at the World Cup can pave the way for other players of South Asian heritage to reach the game’s biggest stage.

The 27-year-old became the first Sikh to play at a World Cup when he took the field in New Zealand’s 2-2 draw with Iran in Los Angeles in their opener.

“It means a lot to me, it means a lot to my people, my family, my community,” he told reporters at the team’s hotel in San Diego, California on Thursday.

“I’m very happy to be the first, and pave the way for the rest of them coming through,” he said.

“I hope to see many more Singhs and Sikhs and Punjabi footballers coming through, and Indian heritage footballers.”

India have never played at a World Cup, though they qualified for the 1950 tournament in Brazil when other Asian nations withdrew from qualifying. India ended up pulling out of the tournament due to financial concerns.

Several players with Indian heritage are representing other nations at the finals in North America, including Australia forward Nishan Velupillay, whose mother has southern Indian roots, and Qatar winger Tahsin Jamshid.

Singh said he had noticed people supporting him when New Zealand played at a tournament in India several years ago.
 
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Why is football called 'soccer' in the US and Canada?​


Margarita Rodríguez
BBC News Mundo

Getty Images A USA fan wears a t-shirt with the US flag looks down on the pitch from high in a stadium as he attends the 2026 World Cup Group D football match between USA and Paraguay at the Los Angeles Stadium in Inglewood


Football is life for millions of fans around the world, but in two of the co-host nations of the 2026 World Cup, they tend to call it by a different name.

In the US and Canada, it's known as soccer. But why? And does that word annoy other football-loving nations?

"When I was a child in England, the word 'soccer' was perfectly acceptable," Stefan Szymanski says.

The emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, says the debate around "football" versus "soccer" struck him as strange.

"I started asking my friends: 'Do you remember? Maybe it's a false memory. Was it ever a problem?' I began talking to people about it. And the consensus was that in the 1970s there didn't seem to be any issue with that word."

Szymanski's interest turned into research.

He explains that, in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport.

"The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said.

The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
 
The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby.

"There were two games: one called rugby football, at that time, and the other called association football," says Szymanski.

Brekker, rugger, soccer​

Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.

"So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'."

Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."

So how did the word "soccer" emerge?
There is a theory, Szymanski says - though he cautions that "no-one is entirely sure".

It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer".

"Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."
 
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Opposing captains shake hands before a match in 1938. On the left is H S Seaford, of Oxford University, and F E Templer of Cambridge on the right

Soccer spreads to Canada, the US and more​

Sports historian Andy Mitchell has pointed to "at least" three examples of "soccer" or "socker" appearing in school magazines in late 1885 in different parts of England.

"My intuition is that 'soccer' and 'rugger' were already being used verbally and had appeared in print earlier that year (1885) in another, as yet unidentified, publication," Mitchell wrote on his blog Scottish Sport History.

Over time, the "socker" variant fell out of use, while "soccer" remained.

The word began travelling to other continents at the same time the sport itself was spreading, and soccer is now often used in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada.

In the United States, "football" refers to American football.

"It's all connected," says Szymanski. "The American version evolved from rugby, but it also has elements of soccer."

"They're like close cousins - and that's why American football became popular around the same time the word 'soccer' was coined, in the 1880s and 1890s."

While British newspapers preferred "football", they continued using "soccer" well into the 1980s, according to analysis by Szymanski and his colleague Silke-Maria Weineck.

Over time, however, "football" became the dominant term.
 
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