A Preliminary Study on the Nicknames of the FIFA National Football Teams

This study examines 315 nicknames of all the 211 FIFA national football teams (NFTs) as of January 2020. A preliminary analysis of these nicknames shows that they have statistically significant differences, suggesting subtle intercultural variation worthy of further investigation. It is hoped that this initial foray into these nicknames will inspire in-depth academic research at the continental and intercontinental levels.


Introduction
Football is a global game with tens of millions of fans, and the World Cup is one of the most popular sports tournaments in the world. Each participating national football team (NFT) has a nickname. For example, the France NFT, the champion of the 21 st World Cup of the F ed eration Internationale de Football Association or FIFA has the nickname Les Bleus 'The Blues', Les Tricolores or L'Equipe Tricolore, 'The Tri-color Team' or the Brazilians of Europe. Croatia's team has two nicknames: Vatreni 'The Blazers' and Kockasti 'The Chequered Ones'. What onomastic strategies do these nicknames reveal? What is behind the different nicknames of these teams? Relevant research includes Franks (1982) on the nicknaming of college athletic mascots; Wilson and Skipper (1990) on the nicknames of women professional baseball players; Nuessel (1994) on the nicknames, logos, and mascots of sport teams in North America; and Lavric et al. (2008) and Guirao (2017) who examine a few select NFT nicknames. However, to our knowledge, the nicknames of NFTs have not been previously systemically studied. In this study, we statistically analyzed all the nicknames of the 211 FIFA NFTs as of January 2020.
In many ways, nicknames provide a richer and more explicit denotation than do given names (Harre 1980). Some of the functions served by nicknames are to break down barriers of formality; increase fan identification; and create a sense of closeness (Lieb 1943;Harre 1980;McBride 1980;Skipper 1985). According to Nuessel (1994), nicknames of sport teams refer to "people or objects in the real world with those positive and negative qualities associated with winning or beating an opponent" (108). In our study of NFTs, the nicknames are usually descriptive and are given in addition to the official team's official name. As will be shown in this investigation, these nicknames often indicate the team colors, animal symbols, regions, nationalities, and guiding virtues. On the surface, naming the NFTs is driven by the combined basic motivation to identify teams and distinguish them from others. However, NFT nicknaming may be subject to many underlying factors worthy of in-depth study. These factors may involve the population size and ethnic diversity as well as the geographical, political, economic, cultural, and historical backgrounds of the teams involved. The aim of the current study is to contribute to the growing body of literature informing name theory. As Leslie and Skipper (1990) suggest, onomastic theory is in critical need of valid empirical evidence gathered on solid methodological grounds. Towards that end, they recommend that researchers: 1) document nicknames and their origins within specific samples; 2) analyze nickname data by positing potential classification categories for the names; and 3) determine the conditions under which the names are used. By taking these steps, it becomes possible to identify the constitutive, preferential, and ad hoc rule-bounded properties of nicknames and nickname use. It is hoped that this preliminary analysis of the nicknames of the NFTs will contribute to this overall goal, and encourage more expansive and comprehensive investigations of these nicknames in future.

Methodology
The methodology was mainly adopted from Wilson and Skipper (1990). Firstly, the list of nicknames of all the 211 NFTs was established from Wood (2008), Wikipedia (2019a), Wikipedia (2019b) and over 200 webpages introducing the NFTs hyperlinked to the latter two. In addition, a Google search was performed for "nickname þ National Football Team þ a specific team's name" (See the Appendix). The next step was to develop a classification scheme. Ten classification types were derived by analyzing the total 477 terms identified in the 315 nicknames of the 211 NFTs. In Table 1, these classification types are represented by letters A to J and followed by real-life examples.
If the same NFT had more than one nickname, all the nicknames were classified and counted. For example, the Brazil NFT has four nicknames: Canarinha 'Little Canary', Selec¸ão 'The National Squad', Verde-Amarela 'The Green and Yellow', and Esquadrão de Ouro 'The Golden Squad'. If the nickname was composed of more than one term, each term was classified and used for the statistical analyses. For example, Golden Jaguars, the nickname of the Guyana NFT, was considered both color-related and animal-related; therefore, it was included in the tallies for two different onomastic types, represented by type codes C and E. However, La Albiceleste 'the Sky-Blue and Whites', the nickname of Argentina, was considered to have only one color-related term even though it consists of two colors.
This procedure was followed to classify the 477 terms in the 315 nicknames of the 211 NFTs investigated. The percentage of each onomastic type identified in the set of the 477 terms in the nicknames is shown in Table 2.
Afterwards, the 211 FIFA NFTs were divided into six groups based on the football confederations/associations to which the teams belong. These groups are 1) Union of European Football Associations (UEFA); 2) Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF); 3) Asian Football Confederation (AFC); 4) Confederation of African Football (CAF); 5) South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL); and 6) Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). The terms contained in the nicknames of all the NFTs for each of the six confederations/associations were first classified. Then, the distribution of type codes for each of the six groups was compared along with the distribution patterns of the NFTs to detect whether there were statistically significant differences.

Results and Discussion
The first research question was which confederation/association had the most and least frequent use of nicknames. The group with the highest occurrence of nicknames was CONMEBOL. The ten NFTs of this confederation have twenty-one nicknames (i.e. 210%). Eight of the ten CONMEBOL NFTs have two or more than two nicknames, while the Brazil NFT has four nicknames. By comparison, in CAF, the 54 NFTs have only 62 nicknames (114.8%). This result reveals that the African NFTs in FIFA were the least likely to use nicknames. Similarly, in OFC, which is made up of 11 FIFA members, we found only 13 nicknames (118.2%).
We also studied the use of sports signifiers and found that football was never used in the nicknames, even though the official name of each national football team contains the word football. However, we found the word "soccer" and its cross-linguistic variants in The Soca Warriors (Trinidad and Tobago), Socceroos (Australia), and The Soccer Dolphins (Anguilla). The terms "football" and "soccer" are often used to refer to the same sport in the United Kingdom as well as in many other countries. The two terms refer to two different games in the United States, however.

Distribution of Terms in NFT Nicknames
It would not have been valid to statistically analyze the within-group distribution of nicknames for all the six FIFA confederation/associations as the minimum number of occurrences was not always reached. For example, CONMEBOL has only ten NFTs, and OFC has only eleven NFTs. For this reason, the statistical analyses were conducted for only four confederations/associations (i.e. UEFA, CONCACAF, AFC, CAF) together with all NFTs. As shown in Table 3, 12 cells (24.0%) had an expected frequency count of less than 5. The minimum expected count was 1.55. For this reason, the Fisher Exact Probability test was used. The results showed that there were statistically significant between-group differences in the type codes (P-Fisher value < 0.001). To control for the possible inflation of familywise error rates, the Bonferroni-corrected pvalues were used for pairwise comparisons. Table 3 presents the frequency counts and percentages for four confederation/associations as well as all of the NFTs. The subscripted letters denote the subset of the group categories with column proportions that do not significantly differ from one another at the .05 level. Table 3, the type codes D, G, J, marked with the same letter a, had no significant statistical difference among the five groups. The type codes marked with different letters (i.e. A, B, C, E, F, H, I) represented the various between-group differences. These comparisons did reveal significant statistical differences between certain groups: 1. collective: UEFA (16.53) is significantly higher than CAF (2.06); 2. humans: CONCACAF (28.41) is significantly higher than UEFA (9.92), AFC (11.81), and all NFTs (15.09); 3. colors: CAF (5.15) is significantly lower than UEFA (25.62), and AFC (18.11); 4. animals: CONCACAF (7.95) is significantly lower than AFC (27.56), CAF (39.18), and all NFTs (22.43); 5. celestial bodies: UEFA (0.00) is significantly lower than CAF (8.25); 6. regions: UEFA (3.31) is significantly lower than CONCACAF (14.77), AFC (13.39), and CAF (15.46); 7. nationalities: UEFA (16.53) is significantly higher than CAF (2.06). Table 4, UEFA showed a preference for collective and nationalities in their nicknames more than all other associations. CONCACAF favored nicknames with humans the most; AFC and CAF had a special preference for animals; CONMEBOL principally distinguished its teams with colors; and CONMEBOL and OFC never used celestial bodies or natural phenomena in their nicknames.

Special Terms in NFT Nicknames
According to Franks (1982), the ten most frequently used nicknames for US American college athletic teams are, in decreasing order of popularity, the following: eagles, tigers, cougars, bulldogs, warriors, lions, panthers, Indians, wildcats, and bears. As a group, this set of names represents human beings or animals commonly recognized for their strength. By utilizing these symbols, these team names identify themselves with the characteristics considered to be essential for the name-bearing athletic teams (Nuessel 1994). In this study, we found that the NFTs also used such terms in their nicknames. However, the ten most frequently used terms for NFTs were somewhat different. In order of decreasing popularity, the top ten elements in the NFT nicknames were the following: Red (28, 5.87%), Team (26, 5.45%), National (22, 4.61%), Boy (21, 4.40%), Blue (20, 4.19%), Lion (20, 4.19%), White (18, 3.77%), Star (13, 2.73%), Green (13, 2.73%), and Warrior (11, 2.31%). According to our findings, colors were more prominent for the NFTs nicknames than colors in Franks' research (Franks 1982). This was not the only difference found, however. In the US college athletic teams investigated by Franks (1982), the most common element in the sport teams' nicknames was eagles. However, in the current investigation of NFTs, eagle (9) was not as much preferred as lion (20). Another difference between the findings of this study and Franks (1982) was that lion (12) was much more frequently used than tiger (4). It is open to speculation why lion was more popular than tiger in the NFT nicknames. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that lions are strong animals that attack together in a group on the grassland -like football players who collectively seek to vanquish their opponents on a grass turf. Tigers are, by contrast, solitary hunters that stealthily ambush their prey. In this respect, it is interesting that the football teams in this study presented themselves, onomastically-speaking, as being more similar to lions than tigers.
Lions are also popular symbols for strength, nobility, and stateliness in cultures across Europe, Asia and Africa. The international popularity of these positive associations may also help to explain why lion appeared in the nicknames of many NFTs. Looking at the different groupings, we found lion in the nicknames of nine out of 46 countries (19.6%) in AFC; four out of 54 countries (7.4%) in CAF; and six out of 55 countries (10.9%) in UEFA. However, lion never appeared in two confederations: CONMEBOL, and OFC, as shown in Table 5.
Although the popularity of the lion was to be expected, what confused us was the fact that eagle appeared more frequently than tiger (4), especially in CAF. This was not the only area of confusion, however.
Nuessel (1994) noted that the percentage of US college teams that bear the name warrior in their nicknames was 32.2%. However, this was not the case for our study. In fact, no NFT nickname included warrior in UEFA, and CONMEBOL, though knight, an equivalent of warrior in Europe, did appear in the nickname of the Malta NFT. Curiously, warrior did exist in eleven nicknames of NFTs from other continents. As shown in Table 6, four warriors were from AFC, three from CAF, another three from CONCACAF, and one from OFC. It may be that the use of warrior in US athletic nicknames reflects a view that football games are viewed as wars or fights. Whatever the case may be, such cross-cultural differences in the use of warrior in athletic nicknames is worthy of further investigation.
Just as warrior appears to be culturally marked, so too seemed to have been the use of dragon. This word was primarily used in Asian countries or regions-specifically in East Asia (China PR), South Asia (Bhutan), and Southeast Asia (Vietnam). Outside of Asia, dragon also featured in team nicknames from Southeast Europe (i.e. Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Northwest Europe (Wales), as shown in Table 7.
Although dragon was found in many different countries, the images and beliefs about this mythical creature vary by region and culture. In western cultures, since the High Middle Ages, dragons have often been depicted as winged, horned, four-legged, and fire-breathing creatures. By contrast, in eastern cultures, they are usually imagined as wingless, four-legged, serpentine creatures with unusual intelligence and power. In the East, dragons often carry strong positive connotations. In the West, the associations are more ambiguous, ranging from dangerous to demonic. Similar ambiguity was found in another name element: devil. It has been reported that nicknames like Blue Devils are negative, anti-Christian, nicknames that are frequently unwelcomed by parents (Deardorff 1992). However, the South Korean and Vietnamese NFTs of AFC, the Belgian NFT of UEFA, as well as the Congolese NFT from CAF are all called the Red Devils. In this sports context, it may be that these negative associations are somewhat ameliorated. The same has been conjectured of other potentially offensive team names. Roback (1944), Spears (1982), andNuessel (1994) have all pointed out that the name Canuck is extremely pejorative. In the United States, this term is considered by many to be extremely offensive. This sentiment is especially strong among Canadians from Quebec who live in New England in the United States. Nevertheless, the term Canuck is one of the nicknames of the Canadian NFT. More research is required to explain this seeming contradiction.

Summary and Concluding Remarks
This preliminary study has addressed the 315 nicknames of the 211 FIFA national football teams (NFTs). This investigation made the following discoveries: 1) nicknames are the most frequently used in CONMEBOL, and the least in CAF; 2) the sport identifier "football" is never used in nicknames and "soccer" is only rarely used; 3) the three onomastic categories of virtues, natural phenomena, and miscellaneous showed no statistical difference among NFTs; 4) the seven onomastic categories of collective, humans, colors, animals, celestial bodies, regions, and nationalities showed significant statistical differences among NFTs; and 5) the use of specific terms such as lion, warrior and dragon in nicknames are culturally different. It is reasonable to assume that the nicknames of NFTs may be strongly influenced by the individual development of the NFTs. However, we believe that an equal if not even more important factor in nicknaming involves the varying cultural history of each team. The Three Lions of England, for example, have the symbol of three blue lions passantguardant. This image was once the emblem of King Richard I, who reigned from 1189 to 1199. Os Navegadores 'The Navigators' of the Portuguese NFT comes from the nation's previous nautical dominance. The nickname of the Australian NFT, The Socceroos, is a blending of "soccer" and "kangaroos", the unofficial national symbol. By the same token, it is easy to see where the Panamanian and Egyptian NFTs obtained their nicknames: Los Canaleros 'The Canal Men' and ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻝ‬ ‫ﻑ‬ ‫ﺭ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻉ‬ ‫ﻥ‬ ‫ﺓ‬ 'The Pharaohs'. In each of these cases, the cultural motivation for the NFT nickname is transparent to many outsiders. In other instances, insider cultural knowledge is required. For example, the nickname of the NFT from South Korea is 태극전사 'Taegeuk Warriors'. Originating from China's concept of "Yin and Yang", Taegeuk represents spiritual balance in Korean culture. To fans unaware of this fact, the NFT nickname is an enigma.
As has been shown here, nicknames are the manifestation of subtle and profound geographical, historical, and cultural difference. We have to admit that we are not able to work out the exact reasons why the NFT nicknames had such significant differences in their composition. However, it is our hope that by sharing our thoughts and research, we might inspire onomasiologists from other continents to conduct more in-depth investigation of the issues raised here. Indeed, the NFT nicknames are so linguistically and culturally diverse that far more detailed, comprehensive studies are needed. It is hoped that this initial foray into these nicknames of NFTs will inspire more academic research and discussion at both the continental and intercontinental levels.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).