For a long time, the earliest printed example that the Oxford English Dictionary could find was in 1891. With digitisation of many Victorian publications that date has now been pushed back to 1885, when 'soccer' surfaced at the same time as its counterpart 'rugger'.
But this discovery has only served to muddy the waters as there are no fewer than three examples of 'soccer' or 'socker' in late 1885, all printed a few days apart in school magazines from different parts of the country. There is no obvious connection between them, so the mystery remains – where exactly did the word spring from?
More specifically, soccer's invention has often been attributed to Charles Wreford Brown, an Old Carthusian, captain of the University football eleven and an England internationalist (pictured above). However, he can be ruled out as he was still at school when 'soccer' first appeared in print. In any case, the story was not published until 1952, a year after his death, when Geoffrey Green, the legendary football correspondent of The Times, told the anecdote but added the caveat 'Or so the story goes'.
The theory that soccer owes its origin to Oxford University takes a further dent as The Oxford Magazine offers the first printed use of 'Socker' in February 1887, three months after it first used 'Rugger'. Nothing earlier at the University has yet been found.
Nor is there anything to confirm that 'soccer' began life as 'assoccer' before being shortened, which may appear logical but there is no known contemporary usage of 'assoccer'. I believe this speculative explanation surfaced only recently, in the current century.
Let's have a look at the hard evidence, which points to 'soccer' and 'rugger' being created at the same time.
Intriguingly, Marlborough was a rugby-playing school, and although there were other letters in its magazine around that time promoting the merits of association football, only this one used the word 'soccer'.
Amazingly, within days, the word appeared in two other school publications, with a different spelling as 'socker'.
Also that month in Shropshire, at Old Hall School in Wellington, The Oldhallian contained an 'Oxford Letter' from a former pupil who wrote: 'The Varsity played Aston Villa and were beaten after a very exciting game; this was pre-eminently the most important 'Socker' game played in Oxford this term.'
So, in late 1885, correspondents to three geographically diverse schools all felt comfortable in using a new word for association football, and one of them used its equivalent for rugby. Yet there is nothing to link them and it is implausible that they all came up with the same idea simultaneously.
After detailed searches, I have managed to find just a dozen or so instances of 'soccer' by 1890, mainly in school magazines. The Carthusian (Charterhouse) talks of the school’s soccer internationalists in October 1886 and the word appears again in December that year. There are further sightings in The City of London School Magazine in November 1886, The Lancing College Magazine of June 1887, and once more in The Radleian in February 1889.
On a national level, the terminology was picked up by the Boy's Own Paper in April 1889, with an article about 'Football at Oxford' which explained: 'In Varsity patois, Rugby is yclept Rugger while Association has for its synonym Socker.'
However, Harrow boys appear to have had no need of an alternative to 'footer' as 'soccer' did not make its first appearance in The Harrovian until March 1889.
The writer went on to ponder the origin of soccer as a word but was unable to come up with an answer: 'On whose lips Association first changed into Soccer, history is silent.'
That mystery remains the case today, and whether soccer started out as 'Varsity patois' or public school slang, there is no proof as yet.
For now, the credit for its first use goes to an unknown boy at Marlborough College, but I am confident that more about soccer's origin will, one day, be uncovered.
For another perspective on the origins of soccer, see Steve Hendrick's lengthy analysis in Sporting Intelligence, published in 2015.