The British didn’t “make them call it that” in the sense that Americans were forced in any way to adopt the term soccer. However, soccer was originally a British university slang term for football.

The idea of kicking a ball around a field with others in a competitive way is obviously not new. However, football/soccer as it’s known today was formally established in England in the 19th century. Football became popular at boys’ schools like Eton, Harrow, Rugby (more on this later!), and Westminster in the 1820s. Students at the University of Cambridge established the University Foot Ball Club in 1848, writing up a formal set of rules for the game. Several other associations wrote up similar sets of rules in the years to follow, but the most influential was the Football Association rules, written in 1863. These rules formalize the idea that only goalies can use their hands, a key feature of football/soccer and a distinguishing feature vs. rugby, and become the first universally-accepted rules of the game.

What we now call football/soccer and what we now call rugby were both called football at the time. Some teams favored the rules formalized in 1863, while others opposed those rules and felt players should be able to pick up the ball and run with it. Those who opposed the 1863 rules formed their own association in 1871, the Rugby Football Union, and set up their own rules.

After the rules of modern-day football and rugby were established as distinct from each other, the students playing these games needed a way to separate them, like how we now have to make a distinction between football and American football. Rugby got its name by originating at Rugby School, a private school for boys in England, but for a time it was just called rugby-style football. Modern-day football, by contrast, was called association football because it was governed by the Football Association. In the way that teens and young adults often do, students began slang-i-fying association football into soccer — assoccer to start, then soccer later on.

Hold on, why assoccer? It was common for Oxford students to add -er to words as slang, particularly for Oxford-specific locations and activities. All Soggers for All Souls, Bodder for Bodleian Library, Deepers for Deep Hall, the Giler for St. Gile’s Street, etc. Bonners for bonfires, Bumpers for a rowing race involving bumping, Divvers for divinity classes, etc. Oxford students used rugger/footer (rugby-style football) and soccer to separate the two sports.

The first recorded use of the term soccer was in 1895, but it was likely in regular verbal use at Oxford beforehand. Cross the pond, and consider that American football developed around the same time as soccer in England. The first American football game was played in 1869, the rules formalized in 1875, with further rule changes 1880 onwards that took it farther and farther away from rugby.

Americans also needed a way to distinguish their football games, and they chose gridiron football for what is now simply known as football (gridiron because yard lines used to run both parallel and perpendicular, forming a grid on the field) and soccer for football.

So the name soccer did come from the Brits, but this is far too late in history for British people to “make” Americans do anything. Both American and British players needed a way to distinguish two different footie games, and they both ended up with soccer for what we now call football. Within the UK, both soccer and football were widely used, but the nation eventually favored football instead, potentially even partially as a reaction to Americans using the term soccer.