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Basically to differentiate itself from another football played there, the American, that sport with touchdowns and quarterbacks. The confusion with the name football — the original English version of the word “soccer”, which means something like “ball with the foot” — began in the mid-19th century and also involves a third sport, rugby. The name football was common to these three sports because all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, required contact between the foot and the ball at some point during the game.
At that time, the rules were not standardized and particularly the norms of rugby and our football were mixed in matches that opposed different colleges in England. In 1863, however, the Football Association (FA) was created in London, an entity that defined the main rules of batting that would conquer Brazilians. The use of hands was prohibited by the FA and, thus, football was definitively separated from the so-called Rugby Football, which came to be known only as rugby (name of a university and an English county where the sport would have been born).
Also in the 19th century, but in the United States, the practice of a sport similar to rugby grew, which there was called American Football, or simply football. When our football arrived in the United States, it was called association football, that is, the sport standardized by the Football Association. Soon, the name of bate-bola was abbreviated to association, then just assoc, until it reached the form used today, with the suffix “er”, that is, soccer.