I thought I'd take "Soccer By The Numbers" literally for a change. How? For years, Google has been busy digitizing books and printed materials, and they've been going back into historical archives. So now, researchers (and, well, anyone with access to a computer, like me) can search for words or phrases that have occurred in print over the past several hundred years, give or take. The so-called Books Ngram Viewer is a tool that displays a graph of how frequently those phrases or words have occurred in a particular corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "American English", "French", etc.) over the selected years.* This also means we can us the tool to take a look at "soccer" by the numbers.
I thought we'd start with the motherland of the beautiful game. So here's a graph of the popularity of the words "soccer" and "football" over the period between 1850 and 2008 in British English - that is, only books published in Great Britain. Take a look.
To the extent that the words we use reflect what we talk and think about, the graph reveals very nicely the steady rise of football as part of British culture and society. Right around the time of the formation of the English and then Scottish FA's in 1863 and 1873, football becomes part of the (British) English lexicon. Another interesting facet is that there has been a noticeable change in the trajectory in recent history. Since the early 1990's - and the formation of the Premier League - there has been an even steeper increase in how commonly-used the word "football" is. Finally, I thought it would be fun to compare the popularity of "football" and "soccer" in British English. While the term "soccer" is indeed a poor cousin to "football", it, too, has seen a noticeable increase, especially since the early 1990s.
And speaking of soccer, much has been made of the American colonies' lack of interest in English-style football, and instead the popularity of American-style rugby (aka "American football"). So what is the trend in the use of "soccer" in books in American English, defined as books published in the United States? See for yourself.
In the United States, the popularity of "soccer" reached its initial height in the 1930s, but then plateaued for several decades until the 1970s. Starting in the early 70s, "soccer" saw a significant increase in popularity, perhaps as a function of the North American Soccer League that saw the likes of Pele and Beckenbauer ply their trade on American soil. But more remarkably, soccer's ascent in American English has sped up in the 1990s - incidentally also the time of the World Cup held in the U.S. and Major League Soccer's birth as the latest and healthiest incarnation of professional soccer in North America.
Since the Ngram tool is just a little bit addicting, I am likely to find a couple of other things that have to do with "'soccer' by the numbers" in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned.
* It's important to know that it does not simply count the number of occurrences, but measures their relative frequency (so the fact that more books are published today than were in, say, 1800 is taken into account).
I thought we'd start with the motherland of the beautiful game. So here's a graph of the popularity of the words "soccer" and "football" over the period between 1850 and 2008 in British English - that is, only books published in Great Britain. Take a look.
To the extent that the words we use reflect what we talk and think about, the graph reveals very nicely the steady rise of football as part of British culture and society. Right around the time of the formation of the English and then Scottish FA's in 1863 and 1873, football becomes part of the (British) English lexicon. Another interesting facet is that there has been a noticeable change in the trajectory in recent history. Since the early 1990's - and the formation of the Premier League - there has been an even steeper increase in how commonly-used the word "football" is. Finally, I thought it would be fun to compare the popularity of "football" and "soccer" in British English. While the term "soccer" is indeed a poor cousin to "football", it, too, has seen a noticeable increase, especially since the early 1990s.
And speaking of soccer, much has been made of the American colonies' lack of interest in English-style football, and instead the popularity of American-style rugby (aka "American football"). So what is the trend in the use of "soccer" in books in American English, defined as books published in the United States? See for yourself.
In the United States, the popularity of "soccer" reached its initial height in the 1930s, but then plateaued for several decades until the 1970s. Starting in the early 70s, "soccer" saw a significant increase in popularity, perhaps as a function of the North American Soccer League that saw the likes of Pele and Beckenbauer ply their trade on American soil. But more remarkably, soccer's ascent in American English has sped up in the 1990s - incidentally also the time of the World Cup held in the U.S. and Major League Soccer's birth as the latest and healthiest incarnation of professional soccer in North America.
Since the Ngram tool is just a little bit addicting, I am likely to find a couple of other things that have to do with "'soccer' by the numbers" in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned.
* It's important to know that it does not simply count the number of occurrences, but measures their relative frequency (so the fact that more books are published today than were in, say, 1800 is taken into account).
