If you are like me you always wondered exactly what 'FIFA" stands for....they don't make it easy to find out, but it's 'Fédération Internationale de Football Association' (the federation was founded in France in 1904, hence the French). I don't blame them for not wanting to let us know because the name doesn't really seem to make much sense. Shouldn't it be 'Fédération Internationale des Associations de Football'? It seems to be some kind of bilingual atrocity; a mixture of French and English that makes no sense in either language or even in transliteration. No wonder they just call themselves 'FIFA' all the time.
Update: Oops, my mistake. I saw this Wikipedia article, which explains all. FIFA is not an international federation of football associations, as I assumed above, but an international federation of association football, which is what they call soccer. So the name is correct, even though it does sound weird in North America since we don't ever refer to soccer as association football.
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