Take your pick of a prominent Irish or South African news website and go to the Sport section, they will almost always list the sport as "Soccer". The vast maj

Take your pick of a prominent Irish or South African news website and go to the Sport section, they will almost always list the sport as "Soccer". The vast majority of takes on the Internet about the word soccer are lazy anti-Americanism. I accept that it's just a pet peeve for you, but I was addressing the general discourse on the term. With regards to 538 using the term soccer, it is explicitly an American website. 538 is the number of electors in the US electoral college. The majority of readers are American, therefore it seems reasonable to use the term soccer. You could argue that they should just use the term football and have the reader infer from context which sport it is, but then we wouldn't be having this discussion if you thought that was an acceptable solution :P