football [LME] Football is truly the world sport, but it means different things in different places. In Britain it is Association football or *soccer, or to some people *rugby is football. In the USA it is American football, and in Australia Australian Rules. In most forms of football, the ball is handled as well as kicked, and this seems to have been the case when similar games were played in ancient Greece, Rome, and China. In medieval Europe it was a rowdy game with vague rules and large numbers of participants, and often banned by rulers. The first written evidence of the term football comes in about 1350: ‘the head went from the body, as if it were a football’. In Britain a political football [M19th] is a controversial or much-debated issue—one that is ‘kicked around’ in discussion—whereas in the USA a football [1960s] is a briefcase containing the codes the President would use to launch a nuclear attack, carried by an aide and kept available at all times. The comparison was made because in American football players hold on to the ball tightly, letting go only to pass to a colleague.