Reply #18: Really? I can think of three completely different games called football.

[Xithras]

In some parts of the world, the game we American's call rugby is called football. In most of the world, the game we Americans call soccer is called football. Here in America, we call our forward pass derivation of rugby "football".

For the past 2000 years, "football" or the local/temporal equivalent has been used to define pretty much any game that involves the use of a ball and your feet, including many games that you simply wouldn't recognize today. About 100 years ago, various playing organizations began to standardize some of the rules in some of the games, but the word is still very generic for "ball game that uses the feet".

As such, it shouldn't be capitalized.