Yep, you did it-- Mint is the right answer!

Let me know if you find out lol

Okay that’s one. But there gotta be like… what, 3 more tops?

You could argue that American football plays quite a bit like rugby football, Gaelic football, and Aussie Rules football though. Association football is the odd one that decided you literally can’t use your hands oh except the keeper and oh I guess throw-ins? Every other form of football involves handling the ball with your hands, including the older forms from which modern ones descended.

I think you’re looking at it through a modernist lens; a lens through which the role of horses is virtually nonexistent, and you have exposure to a wide range of international sports with different lineages. Basketball and handball are much newer than the concept of “football,” and share no history with it, so it’s no surprise that they didn’t wind up being called “football.”

The claim isn’t that everything played on foot should be called football (that would be a weird criterion, and not useful). The claim is that the group of sports called football are so called because they are played on foot, not because players are only allowed to use their feet.

It’s not a super widespread idea, but Wikipedia discusses it, so it’s at least not just something I made up.

Thank you! There are two wolves in my heart: One favors being snobby toward the way Americans say things. The other favors being pedantic about term specificity.

“Soccer” causes these wolves to fight.

“Football” is a term used to describe a wide range of field sports played on foot, as opposed to on horseback. It has nothing to do with whether or not you handle the ball with your hands.

Could you be more specific? Do you mean rugby football? Gridiron football? Gaelic football?

Oh! Maybe you meant association football. But that’s kind of long-- maybe we can just say “asoc football” to save time.

Actually now that I think of it, people just say “rugby” instead of “rugby football,” so maybe we can drop the “football” part as well, and just say “asoc.”

There we go, now we have a nice, unambiguous way to refer to the style of football that we’re interested in. Now I just hope the school children don’t mess it up the way they did with rugby, calling it “rugger…”

Maybe? But it’s not like that’s the only alternative thing to say, lol

Lie. Or at best, dangerously wrong. Like saying “Crosswalks make cars incapable of harming pedestrians who stay within them.”