American Football – Why is it called Football?
I think best way to answer this question is to look at the link below. It also seems that somewhere along the line after international football was introduced to the US, it became “soccer” a long long time ago. When I was a kid growing up, I was familiar with international football calling it “soccer.” It was natural to me to call it soccer. Kind of like anyone else like myself with English as a first language, they would call Italy “Italy” naturally and without second thought, whereas people in Italy (from different part of the world than you, different culture) would call their country “Italia.” If that makes sense. So at any rate, when the sport of American football was eventually introduced, it was probably referred to as a or “rugby football” and eventually just shortened to football from a country where most of the people called what you refer to as football “soccer”. That would be my take anyway.
