On this week's Team 33, one line from our regular panellist Conor Neville jumped out vis a vis the place England held for itself in football's formative years.
On an episode in which we were chatting to The Irish Times' Ronan McGreevy about the damage done by the habit of supporting English clubs in particular over our own Irish clubs, and then about the fading history of the FA Cup, Conor brought up an interesting anecdote:
"The FA refused to enter a team in the original World Cup on the grounds that the FA Cup was the greatest football competition in the world and the World Cup [was seen as] this tawdry little event between major nations."
There's also an oft-quoted line which goes a little like this: England invented football but the Brazilians perfected it.
And it's South America that dominated the first World Cup in 1930 with Uruguay and Argentina reaching the final.
But there's no denying England's role in planting the seed for the beautiful game's growth across the planet.
Some of its influence can be see in the curious team names that spring up, particularly in South America.
Whereas many prominent European clubs owe their club colours to the influence of British teams - Juventus and and Notts County and Athletic Bilbao and Southampton as just two examples - English (as well as Irish-sounding) team names are a feature in some South American nations.
Carlos Nunez of Uruguay's Liverpool celebrates after scoring a goal against Bolivia's Universitario de Sucre during a Copa Sudamericana soccer match in Montevideo, Uruguay,Wednesday, July 25, 2012. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
Let's kick off with one which has a distinctly Irish-sounding name.
The O'Higgins club from Chile won the country's national championship back in 2013-14 and have also competed at Copa Libertadores level.
However, its ties to this country are solely limited to the fact that the Rancagua-based club is named after Chile's founding father Bernardo O'Higgins, whose own padre Ambrosio O'Higgins was a general in the Spanish Empire and happened to be born in Co Sligo around 1720.
But if we quickly take a trip across the continent to Uruguay, we see a club called Liverpool - the first Liverpool Luis Suarez would have heard of before hearing about the one he would later play for.
Uruguay's Liverpool may wear blue and black stripes as their home kit, but in homage to the original Liverpool FC, they introduced an all-red away kit in the 2005-06 season.
The Montevideo-based club, which has a long history but few major trophies, is named after the Merseyside club. Legend has it that at a time when Uruguayan football was mesmerised by the English teams that toured the nation, a chap by the name of José Freire looked at a map of Great Britain, spotted Liverpool and chose it as the perfect name for the club due to the fact that many of the coal ships that arrived in Uruguay's capital arrived from the city of Liverpool.
Chile's O'Higgins' Yerson Opazo, right, and Colombia's Deportivo Cali's Robin Ramirez compete for the ball at a Copa Libertadores soccer match in Santiago, Chile, Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014. (AP Photo/Luis Hidalgo)
Everton were one of the clubs that toured the nation, as well as Argentina - where 2007's Copa Sudamericana champions Arsenal de Sarandi are named after London's Gunners - in the early 20th century, but they gave their name to a Chilean club whose full name goes a little like Everton de Viña del Mar as they are based in Viña del Mar.
But let's skip away from the shadow of the Andes again and back to Uruguay where there was once a club by the name of Dublin.
In 1908, the Montevideo-based club named after our capital city made its first appearance in the Uruguayan Championship, alongside English-sounding clubs like Albion and Bristol.
The original Everton played the other Everton for the first time in a pre-season friendly in 2010
Dublin, who finished fourth in their first season, appeared in the Uruguayan top flight for 13 seasons in the early 20th century but unfortunately no longer seem to exist.
However, they do have two big claims to their names and all against Brazil - albeit before the Portuguese speaking nation perfected the game started off by the English.
In January 1917, they held the Brazilian national team to a 0-0 draw in Rio de Janeiro in an unofficial friendly match, before beating them 1-0 almost exactly a year later again in Rio in the Copa Confraternidad.
Seeing as the club is defunct, any chance we could claim that victory as one of our own?
You can read more from Raf's The World Is A Ball series every Wednesday on Newstalk.com. To find past articles, head to the Team 33 show page. And you can also listen into the interview with Ronan McGreevy on this week's Team 33 podcast:
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