The etymology of "soccer"

 This will be my only post relevant to this year's World Cup.

"... in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport.  "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said.  The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby...

Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.  "So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'."  Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."..

It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer".  "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."

More information at the source article at the BBC.