The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) team will play the Netherlands in its eighth final this Saturday. That removes Iran and the team from England, a country where they speak the same language but where football fans are horrified by the word ‘football’. They just play ‘football’. Football beat Welsh football in Qatar.

In the book It’s Fooball, Not Football (and Vice versa) scientists Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck came to an unambiguous conclusion. In short, it reads that in countries where other sports with balls are more popular than football, the latter sport can never claim the name ‘football’ exclusively.

are you still there? OK, be more specific. Sport is called football where players can take a ball (usually oval) in their hands.

In these countries, the most popular sport in the world is called football.

Is it important? Not much, you would say, were it not for the fact that in recent weeks there has been a lot of talk, in public debate, about ‘football culture’. In particular, its absence in countries like Qatar. Footpussy is based on one football culture, while football nation in particular shows that this is nonsense. Of course in America, where football, to put it mildly, has a different social meaning than soccer. That’s why it’s good that the US has to play against two soccer nations in the preliminary round: Wales (1-1) and England (0-0).

In these countries, football is king and the sport is surrounded by a macho culture, with aggressive fans and chants against women, gays and refugees. In America, soccer is primarily a girls’ sport. Second, it is a left-wing sport, a game for ‘liberals’, ‘blue states’, ‘Obama people’ or even ‘communist pansies’, in other words: left-wing sissy. Qualification began in the early 1980s, when a young reporter from The New York Times asked his boss if he could cover football. “Don’t waste time, son,” said the head of sport, followed by a now-famous quote.

There is another, more famous quote. “I think it’s important for young players to know that in real football you kick the ball, you throw it away, you run with it and you put it in someone’s hands. We have to make a clear distinction: football is democratic and capitalist, football is European socialist sport.’ The quote was from Republican politician Jack Kemp, from a passionate plea he had made against hosting the World Cup in his own country.Shortly thereafter, presidential candidate Robert Dole chose him as his running mate.

‘Football is democratic and capitalist, whereas football is a European socialist sport’

Recently, a famous American columnist called football ‘not individual enough’. In baseball, a lone man stands on the mound, in basketball, the star player regularly accounts for half the points, and in American Football, everything revolves around the playmaker, who is called the ‘quarterback’.

The American right hates football so much because its popularity stems from a backlash some fifty years ago, to the white hippies who, now with children, settled in the leafy suburbs of the 1970s. There they let their son play European football. Why? If you ask Americans, true: because they are anti-American, flag-burning, and self-loathing. If you ask them themselves, they say: because we want our children to do something different, something European.

Something less militaristic than football in particular. The manager of the Washington Diplomats, the team for which Cruijff played his second season in America, was thrilled with the Dutch superstar because he proved ‘that little skinny guy can be a superstar’.

The manager told me this year after the team closed, when I was writing a book about Cruyff’s years in America. I also later discovered that Cruijff looked with regret at the non-competitive attitude around soccer in the US, especially among parents and youth. Some youth leagues don’t even track goals. That will exacerbate the urge to assert too much. ‘Frankly ridiculous’, thought Cruijff.

The Brazilian Pelé loved it, a completely different football culture. When he said goodbye to the New York crowd after three seasons (playing for the Cosmos), he made the whole stadium roar ‘love’ three times in a row. Pictures from the stands during the farewell match showed something of the sort Hair, Musical. They remember the term ‘commie pansy’ and take us to the real present, where Western European countries want their captains to wear One-Love bracelets, while their football culture has a strong taboo against homosexuality.

In America it’s different. The red and white stripes of US Soccer’s national shield are even regularly painted in the colors of the rainbow, not just in Qatar or in protest. “As an association, we want to celebrate and promote diversity,” the chairman said last week The New York Times. The US women’s team, the reigning world champions, has several openly lesbian players, and the majority of men who win football at the global Gay Games are American.

But hostility to the word ‘football’ in England is not primarily about sexual orientation or left-wing sympathies. Class struggle plays a bigger role, scientists say in their book about the struggle between football and football. This has something to do with the origin of the word s. It’s in the Oxbridge circle. The word football originated about 150 years ago as a corruption of the word association football. It was a time when the British elite liked to shorten all kinds of words to ‘er’. For example, students call the Radcliffe Camera, a library in Oxford, ‘radder’, rugby is ‘rugger’, and breakfast is not a ‘breakfast’ but a ‘breaker’.

Due to its elitist origins, the use of the word among the British working class evokes an aura of class betrayal. Real men play football. Confirmation followed across the ocean, where soccer was a sport for girls and the kids of the rich.

Of course, soccer in the US has traditionally been popular with residents of Latin American descent – ​​and there are some in the US. But that does little to change the political connotation of the sport. Simply put, of the estimated 25 million Americans who will watch the quarterfinals in America (versus the 112 million who watch the annual Super Bowl football final), only a fraction will vote for Donald Trump. Football? Or not: soccer… Sports have always been alongside oatmeal milk and electric cars. Come to the Netherlands for that.