What ⚽ means
No — the ball sign was already in print.
In 1997 a Japanese mobile carrier — the company later renamed SoftBank — already had a player-and-ball emoji. A 2008 Unicode proposal showed the plain ball in a German football rulebook, on Munich transit signs pointing to the stadium, and in an events brochure.
Why does Unicode call it a soccer ball?
Its English name simply uses the word "soccer". That isn't a ruling on the sport's name. "Soccer" was coined in Britain in the late 1800s from "Assoc.", short for association football, the game played under the Football Association's rules; the usual story credits Oxford student slang. Both words long coexisted in Britain before "football" won out. The US and Canada say "soccer", as many Australians do, because "football" there can mean another game.
Literal sports talk, no innuendo.
Meaning American football? Send 🏈.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- The black pentagons on white hexagons became the classic ball after the Telstar ball at the 1970 World Cup, patterned to stand out on black-and-white TV.
Questions people ask
1What does it mean when someone sends just ⚽?
Sport talk. A match, an invite to play or watch, or a goal reaction; it has no widely recognised slang meaning.
How to type ⚽
:soccer:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.⚽Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.