SBS and online publisher Crikey.com.au are currently embroiled in a spat over the term "the world game" and more precisely, who has the rights to use those words in an online medium.

It is unclear who first used the term "the world game" to describe soccer, but we know that Les Murray (the SBS soccer guru, not the poet) picked up the expression in the late 1990s and used the expression frequently on the SBS soccer shows.

By 2000, SBS had established theworldgame.com.au, a specialist soccer website and not long afterwards started a Sunday afternoon TV show of the same name.

So it can be said with some certainty that if SBS didn't coin the expression, it certainly made it part of the sporting lexicon in Australia.

But whether it has exclusive rights to the term in Australia is another matter entirely.Crikey uses the the term as a subject category on its website whenever it runs a soccer item, but because of that is now on the receiving end of a ‘cease and desist' notice from the legal team at SBS.

It all seems a bit heavy-handed. SBS is a major player in Australian soccer, but it doesn't own the sport or any of its intellectual property, despite what Les Murray might think.

The soccer crowd can get a bit precious when it comes to their name. They want their sport to be known as football in Australia, like it is in just about every other country apart from the United States. But the issue there, as it is here, is that soccer has to yield to an indigenous football code when it comes to popularity.

Complicating the issue in Australia is that rugby league and rugby union dominate northern Australia, while the AFL is the king of southern Australia. National media outlets now differentiate between league, union and AFL, yet when Sandy Roberts says "...and turning to football" on the Channel Seven news in Melbourne tonight, he'll be talking about the AFL and he won't have to explain why.

SBS's hopes of winning this battle took a blow on Thursday when Sam Roggeveen, editor of online magazine Interpreter, opined that ‘the world game" is a term that should be dropped. Roggeveen is employed by the Lowy Institute, whose founder Frank Lowy also just happens to be the chairman of the Football Federation of Australia.

"Why?" Roggeveen writes. "Because referring to soccer as ‘The World Game' implies that those who enjoy soccer are sophisticated and cosmopolitan, while anyone who favours another Australian football code is a provincial hick."

Great words. And it is a sentiment that will have great support among the masses, many of whom would say that while soccer is a fine sport, it is not necessarily their favourite sport or even their preferred code of football.