What, if anything else, should "Football" have been called?

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You despise soccer so much.

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Soccer was the nickname/general term for the sport

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It was in England where the first official Association with clear rules was formed. For centuries before the first meeting of the Football Association in the Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, London on 26 October 1863, there were no universally accepted rules for playing football. In 1862, Ebenezer Cobb Morley, as captain of Barnes, wrote to Bell's Life newspaper proposing a governing body for the sport "with the object of establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game"; the letter led to the first meeting at The Freemasons' Tavern that created the FA in 1863. Morley was a founding member. Six meetings near London's Covent Garden, at 81–82 Long Acre, ended in a split between the Association football and Rugby football. Both of them had their own uniforms, rituals, gestures and highly formalised rules.

In public school games, the rules were formalised according to local conditions; but when the schoolboys reached university, chaos ensued when the players used different rules, so members of the University of Cambridge devised and published a set of Cambridge Rules in 1848 which was widely adopted. Another set of rules, the Sheffield Rules, was used by a number of clubs in the North of England from the 1850s.

Eleven London football clubs and schools' representatives met on 26 October 1863 to agree on common rules. The founding clubs present at the first meeting were: Barnes, Civil Service, Crusaders, Forest of Leytonstone (later to become Wanderers F.C.), N.N. (No Names) Club (Kilburn), the original Crystal Palace, the original Blackheath, Kensington School, Perceval House (Blackheath), Surbiton F.C., Blackheath Proprietary School.

Charterhouse sent their captain, B.F. Hartshorne, but declined the offer to join. Many of these clubs are now defunct or still play rugby. Civil Service FC, who now plays in the Southern Amateur League, is the only one of the original eleven football clubs still in existence, with an unbroken history, and playing association football, although Forest School has been a member since the fifth meeting in December 1863. Both Barnes and Wanderers have been re-established as football clubs in the modern era.

Ebenezer Cobb Morley was the FA's first secretary (1863–66) and its second president (1867–74) and drafted the Laws of the Game generally called the "London Rules" at his home in Barnes, London. He played in the first-ever match in 1863.

The first version of the rules for the modern game was drawn up over a series of six meetings held in The Freemasons' Tavern from October to December. Of the clubs at the first meeting, Crusaders, Surbiton and Charterhouse did not attend the subsequent meetings, replaced instead by the Royal Navy School, Wimbledon School and Forest School.

Split from rugby

At the final meeting on 8 December 1863,F. . Campbell, the first FA treasurer and the Blackheath representative, withdrew his club from the FA over the removal of two draft rules at the previous meeting, the first which allowed for the running with the ball in hand and the second, obstructing such a run by hacking (kicking an opponent in the shins), tripping and holding. Other English rugby clubs followed this lead and did not join the FA but instead in 1871 formed the Rugby Football Union. The term "soccer" dates back to this split to refer to football played under the "association" rules. After six clubs had withdrawn as they supported the opposing Rugby Rules, the Football Association had just nine members in January 1864: Barnes, Kilburn, Crystal Palace, War Office (Civil Service), Forest Club, Forest School, Sheffield, Uppingham and Royal Engineers (Chatham).

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