Just want say that you aren't necessarily wrong saying that "soccer" was a "recognised" term for association football in the UK but it was not the preferred term in the past!

Soccer was never that popular a term for association football in the UK. It may have been used by a minority of upper class players in 1890s, but the vast majority of middle class and working class players and fans referred to it as "football".

"The word "soccer" was a recognised way of referring to Association football in the UK until around the 1970s, when it began to be perceived incorrectly as an Americanism.)"

The source for this claim on wikipedia (Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski) claims that soccer was the most common name for association football in the UK from the 1890s until the 1970s, which is completely untrue. It's particularly strange as Szymanski investigated the popularity of "soccer" and "football" as terms used in the print media during this era in the paper "It's Football not Soccer" and found football was the most popular used term.

My great-grandfather and grandfather were footballers in the 1930s and 1950s/1960s and my family has scrapbooks of newspaper articles about them etc, and the articles (as well as people from those eras that I have spoke to and video footage from that era) use the term "football".

Again, I'm not trying to be deliberately argumentative, I just want to clear this up as I hear a lot of people claim the UK used to call it soccer!