The 'football' tag
Since we are currently discussing tagging conventions in other areas of ~ I thought it would be useful to start one in this group.
The 'football' tag is currently used for both association football and American football. This is not a surprise, but we should agree on how to handle this from now on, in order to not hinder the tagging functionality (ie people wanting to filter out one of the sports).
Here are some ideas, to kickstart the discussion:
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Use soccer for association football and football for American football
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use football for association football and other terms (like NFL, NCAA) for American football
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don't use the football tag and use association and American football instead.
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Use tag groups to solve this issue, ie football.association and football.american
This won't be the last time we have to deal with an ambiguous tag. My general feeling is that Tildes is an English-speaking site, but not an American-centric one, and we should use the meaning most common across the English-speaking world.
That would point towards "football" meaning the most popular sport in the world, "american football" meaning handegg, etc. I don't think the "association football" qualifier is necessary because it's so commonly just referred to as football.
We should separate out tags for the sport, like we've got here, with tags for the league, and that will help disambiguate it as well.
american football, ncaa, alabamavs.football, epl, manchester united, and so on.Fun fact: in American football the only players whose feet normally touch the ball are called the "special team".
I like this suggestion best, however ~sports.americanfootball seems a little long to type out, especially on mobile. What are your thoughts on shortening it to ~sports.NAfootball for North American football? That name is actually used on the Wikipedia page and has the added benefit of covering Canadian football too, so both the ~sports.NAfootball.NFL and ~sports.NAfootball.CFL tags would make sense. Austrailian football could also be shortened in a similar way to ~sports.AUfootball.
Just use an NFL tag and a CFB tag for American football like on reddit. Probably the easiest way.
That doesn't sufficiently group american football topics though. You wouldn't be able to browse both NFL and CFB at the same time using your suggestion.
That doesn't seem like a big deal. I think the more niche the better. Thats the best part of reddit.
I like this idea a lot. It is nicely structured, and it also asked room for future expansion (eg football.australian, football.gaelic).
On your concerns:
Yeah, this could be a potential problem. But it affects the wider tildes structure. A viable solution would be to display sub-categories at the top of the search results.
I don't think this is a real concern. MLS falls under the broader scope of soccer/association football. I think MLS fans would be fine with their stuff falling under football.association.
Stylised facts:
american-footballfor what is going to be used very oftenSolution I propose:
footballis banned. The group ~sports.football is locked from posting/commenting and contains a single text post (preferably auto-expanded, if possible) containing links to the groups dedicated to sports referred to as football.soccer. This term is acceptable for the sport even where it is the dominant football code.american-footballis acceptable as it is a minor sport there.aflandcfl. For the competitions in these sports outside their respective countries, longer tags should be acceptable.Unresolved questions:
gridironacceptable for American/Canadian football for the natives of USA/Canada?footy?)GAAor ~sports.GAA be similarly acceptable?I do not find this pleasing, or particularly acceptable.
I will never ever tag anything with "soccer".
I've lived in a few countries over the years, both northern and southern hemisphere, and it's been "football" in all of them. I only really became aware that anyone called it soccer when I started internetting, and it seems to be mostly North America who uses "soccer".
I mean, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter, but "soccer" just sounds and looks wrong to me.
I'm not sure of the accuracy but I have seen this map a few times which pretty much says you're right. Soccer pretty much only being the popular term in the US/Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Ireland.
Of course any time I see it posted there are Aussies saying it's about 50/50 and Irish saying similar.
This imgur comment on that map takes it to a whole new place
Historically, a lot of English people don't like 'soccer' because it's the public school (i.e upper and upper middle class) term for the game. These days people don't like it because it's seen as the American term and also because there's a general feeling that we invented the sport so we should get to decide what it's called.
Tbh I always found it hilarious that all the non-Americans have to live with their main forum being called /r/soccer on reddit. That said, /r/football is dedicated to the same sport because /r/CFB and /r/NFL take care of virtually all gridiron football discussion. Maybe that’s how we can preserve ~sports.football for association football then leave ~sports.CFB and ~sports.NFL to handle all gridiron football.
And as far as post tags go, how about if you had to tag both “soccer” and “football” when you meant association football then “football” + “CFB” or + “NFL” when you meant gridiron? Just thinking out loud here.
EDIT: or alternatively, what if we only used “football” when referring to association football then just used “CFB” and “NFL” alone for gridiron? They have football built into their initials.
The football/soccer thing is one of the few arguments I enjoy, mainly because it's so pointless and utterly unimportant. It's something that can only be taken in good humour, as far as I'm concerned, because if anyone actually does get upset by it they have far bigger issues to deal with than regional terminology for kicking a ball.
Oh you have to have a good sense of humor about it.
Ah, I see you're a Simplified English speaker. My condolences.
Futbol - for association football
NFL - for American football at the professional level
CFB - College Football at the college/university level
There are enough divisions of American Football that calling it football is a little ambiguous
Perfect!
I'd have to agree that the best route might be to outright not use the football tag and tag with leagues instead like @rapideyemovement said; ~sports.NFL, ~sports.Bundesliga, ~sports.MLS, ~sports.SerieA, ~sports.AFL, and so on, so ~sports.football would ideadly never exist.
If that solution weren't preferable I'd say ~Football for 'American Football' ~Soccer for 'Association Football' because regardless of what the world says more here and there the internet sports culture by and large knows that for the most part it is going to be ~Soccer. I'm pretty sure half of the /r/soccer mods are British and even they've accepted that its not a battle worth fighting on the internet. And as a /r/sports mod, the only people that really complain to us that our flairs are dumb are English, the rest of people know that's just the way it goes.
BTW r/football exists (I have just checked and am really surprised) and is about soccer.
That has been a source of upset for the fans of American Rugby for a long time, and a source of mild amusement too me for a while.
Has it? 'American Rugby' fans have r/nfl and /cfb and I don't think I've even seen more than just one or two cry babies complain that it should be about 'American Rugby' ... so about as amusing as the people who think saying soccer is the biggest insult to their sport they could ever imagine. So not very.
I'm easily amused by silly things though.
I can understand that.
and is tremendously less popular... 66k subscribers vs 1.1 million on /r/soccer
Right, but I expected r/football to be non-existent or a locked sub with links to r/soccer, r/nfl, r/afl etc.
I think let people call it whatever. In australia for example, "football" or "footy" could refer to:
I have a feeling it might just become scorched earth like /r/football on reddit
~Football.american
That works for ~football.australian as well!
Is that AFL, 'the footy', or rugby?
That's AFL and I think they refer to it as footy sometimes, but that's ambiguous.
I'm Aussie myself, I was pointing out that Australia has multiple types of local football (the footy is rugby league, where rugby is rugby union).
That makes it sound like they're subsets of the same game.
They are, they're all games where you run around on foot chasing a ball. All the regulated games are (relatively) recent modifications of that basic premise. The wiki page on mediaeval football is a great read.
Do you really not think they're far enough away to warrant being considered their own thing?
I understand the temptation to pull facts like this out, but gridiron football and soccer are so ridiculously distinct from each other that this just seems silly. That, and unless every other sport was required to be tagged in terms of its historical ancestry, it'd really stick out.
It wasn’t really a comment on whether that’s a good naming convention, just explaining why they’re all called football despite the varying importance of foot contact in each code.
As far as the naming goes, the fact that this thread has uncovered a plethora of different games all called football implies that assigning that name to just one of those games will cause a debate that will rumble on as long as one of those mediaeval town games.
Could you imagine playing a sport with your whole town and a realistic chance of being trampled to death?
There's an annual Shrovetide match in a town close to where I live. I've been a couple of times, but I've never participated, because I like being alive.
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/shrovetide-football-ashbourne-2018-1186603
I've seen footage of some of the modern games, and two hundred drunk sweaty blokes heaving around a town square looks like a recipe for at least a few bruises...
Yeah, especially when the "game" is sixteen hours long over two days.
Thanks for that!
Def helps explain why so many commonalities in modern football-ish sports.
I've caught Gaelic Football and Hurling games (matches?) on BBC World or something & thoroughly enjoyed them.
Knew nothing about the rules except what could be inferred while watching, but as a big fan of rugby & "American rugby"... it's fascinating comparing/contrasting what're clearly siblings of games I like.
Aren't they subsets of the same game, kinda? I always understood that US football grew out of association football.
US football looks a lot closer to Rugby (to my untrained eye)
They all emerged from team games with informal or variable rules, but you're right that it's most like rugby nowadays, with only two critical differences: you're allowed forward passes and you can tackle players not holding the ball.
Everything else is the result of 100+ years of tinkering with the details in both codes.
What about futbol for association football?
Why not use that for American football?