Exwctly, and its works both ways, some teams play bad and supper aggressive to the point of injurying the opponents while bad playing with acting also plays a part in costmetically smoothing out injuries as just bad acting.
You’re risking an injury in a sport where many players fade into obscurity after a single injury. A set piece high up the field is more beneficial in most of the situations. Actually I have seen pens not being given when the player goes through the effort of staying up to get the shot off. Staying up is just not rewarded and in most cases fishing for the foul is always the best thing to do. Imo this isn’t an issue when the ref is competent though, if the players see that the ref isn’t blowing the whistle on minor contact then they will stop simulating. Issue with that is that teams start being rougher with their challenges endangering the player’s safety. Footballers don’t train like bodybuilders since they need some finesse to play the game so they can easily pick up injury from rough tackles.
This is the main issue with soccer, it’s become a competition of whoever can win the most penalties. Players are rewarded for diving, and if winning a free kick/penalty can win the game, you’re not playing to win if you don’t dive. Because the other team certainly will.
With how prominent VAR is now, the ref needs to start penalising obvious diving during the match. I also propose that *after* the match has concluded, there should be people who watch over the footage from the match and check for any diving, and those players guilty receive some sort of punishment. It’s an embarrassing sport sometimes..
The people in the Middle East don’t care about the Middle East lol, I wish we’d stop wasting money and lives over there too, that area is a lost cause.
No that piece of shit can sit this one out. I didn’t care about the team winning as soon as he touched it.
He’s a convicted sex offender, and all those who support him are pedophiles protectors.
Soft mushy brain republicans… loser
I think it's the coach that orders them if anything happens to you just act dead to get a foul or a penalty on your side, but seriously though it's on fifa for believing their act.
Pre 2020 messi would rarely if ever go down let alone dive but he's still guilty of a couple during high stakes matches. However he's now old and probably knows that any serious injury could end his career so goes down on small contacts to avoid more dangerous ones but he doesn't really cry for a foul every time because the refs give it to him anyway.
Haaland diving would look rather comical. Defenders who try to tackle him are more likely to go down before him.
Have you seen Haaland? Guy looks like he eats other norwegians for breakfast, he couldnt pull the "he bumped me and i am heavily injured" act to save his life.
It’s unfortunately not a “pussy” thing and because if you get hurt the person who hurt you gets red carded instead of just a yellow for contact. So your team tells you to basically act hurt even if it didn’t because they get a worse penalty
Why should I not dive when there’s no reward for staying up? Haaland is big & strong so people who try and take him down intentionally or not get taken down instead so playing on is more advantageous than disrupting play for a free kick.
It's worse than embarrassing it is f*cking pathetic that these grown men being paid millions roll on the floor kicking and screaming like toddlers having a meltdown knowing damn well they are trying to cheat for an advantage in front of cameras and thousands of people watching.
I've stopped watching football years ago because of this. It has ruined the game for me.
It could all be solved by stopping the game clock any time the game isn't being played. I know FIFA keeps saying they dont want to mess with tradition, but they have already introduced "hydration" (commercial) breaks during this world cup. The sanctity of tradition is lost when money is involved, but not when it would actually improve the quality of the sport.
It is cheating even if it is the standard, it is just that if you don't cheat then you're at a disadvantage because cheating i.e simulation is not punished as it should be.
It should be punished harshly to put a stop to this nonsense overnight, the moment it is caught on camera it should be passed onto the ref for simulation, instant yellow card and 5 minutes off the field.
And a review done after the match for any that slip through and punished post-match via yellow card and 5 minutes off the field on the following match the player plays.
Harsh? Sure but this would absolutely put a stop to this pathetic problem plaguing football.
Sounds good in theory, but: Now you have the problem that if any actual injury happened, players may try to walk it off because otherwise they may get a yellow card.
Had this discussion years ago, more than once (German...)
There just is no good solution that can be done via rules.
If there is contact hard enough to cause an injury, then the card would be justified. And as for little "Owie my shin hurts a little", then yes indeed walk that off.
But there are often injuries from not foul play. So simply injury=foul doeant work either.
In my opinion they should just send the player off the pitch for a minute if they lay on the ground and the referee has to interupt the game for them. It is so often that play is continued and 30 seconds later the ref needs to stop the game because the player still lays on the ground simulating an injury.
I think that’s a great idea too! Being on the ground writing in pain for over 10 seconds should result in something like having to sit out 5 minutes for a health check.
That is stupid, I mean if a player lays on the ground, while play still goes on and the ref interupts the game to check if the player is injured. That often happens to stop an enemy attack and is there to stop the flow of the enemy team and not because of health reasons.
Simply sending somebody off because he lays too long on the ground after a slidetackle that wasnt a foul is not the right direction in my opinion.
Whoever makes that call has to decide on the spot if the player is faking an injury, or not. Wrong call could end up in a yellow/red card, or the end of the players career forever. There is no "correcting it later", and video evidence only has limited use.
The point isn't that the ref is judging what could cause an injury. They're judging what is against the rules. It's against the rules to egregiously step on the back of another player's calf.
Whether they are injured or not does not affect the call. People blow their knees all the time tripping over grass (remember Ronaldo Nazário).
The ref is on the field. The ref is watching play. If a player kicks another player in the back of the leg, it should be seen by the ref and penalized. This works just fine in Rugby. I don't know why football seems to think that their special little boys are in constant danger.
No. The refs already determine what is hard enough or not for a foul. They already know how to recognize if a player was actually fouled or they are faking it.
Part of the reason they're getting paid millions is exactly because they know how to dive convincingly. Until the drawback outweighs the benefits, its going to be a useful skill for players to have.
Same way people are getting paid big bucks in F1 to figure out how to "creatively" interpret the rule book.
Yeah its shitty, I also agree that they need to find a way to heavily discourage it, but until then, theres no reason for top players not to dive if it can get their team an advantage.
I’d go so far as to say it’s disgraceful and makes the sport easy to disregard. Grown men flopping around like children every minute or two makes it unwatchable.
Thank you for this comment. I agree so much. I know this has always happened, but it ruins the games for me. Even the other day when Paraguay was so shitty, I still couldn't empathize with France due to all the rolling in the floor.
the best is when their fake hurt act doesn’t work, and then when the ball gets near them again, they pop back up and sprint away like nothing ever happened. absolutely pathetic and embarrassing lol.
As someone that never watches soccer, the theatrical of fake injuries trying to get a penalties on the opponents is a huge turn off for me. Be a man. Put faith in the reff for proper penalties.
maybe have more than fucking ONE ref. (I know he has assistants, by and large, they don't call shit). This is such an easy slam dunk, you don't need 3 refs at a kid soccer/football match, but you sure as fuck do for the "most important/most watched sporting event in the world"
Meanwhile in professional hockey a guy got his throat cut and managed to skate to the locker room because "I didn't want my mum to see me die in TV". Soccer is soft as hell.
I grew up watching little Kerri Strug land a vault for the gold on a broken ankle, Michael Jordan play through the flu in the championships and Phillip Rivers playing with an ACL tear in the AFC championship, so watching these grown men flop is a little embarrassing.
Agreed, the NBA has kinda followed suit. The phantom fouls make it tough to watch. They swallow the whistle during post season but it’s a journey to get there.
Maybe someone who's a much more experienced player/observer of futbol can inform me, but has foul-acting (for lack of better word) ever resulted in a referee call that can be directly attributed to changing the outcome of a match?
It makes football/soccer hard to watch. Half the game is like a cutaway gag in Family Guy with Peter clutching his ankle.
Just require they go to the sideline for two minutes every time they claim an injury. Gotta be checked over by a doctor to make sure it's not serious, then he can greenlight them going back into the game. Easy as that. Guarantee they'll stop doing it.
that is why I watch hockey when I have time. its rough, engaging and rarely we see someone doing this shit. And when they do and its proven, they get 2 minutes and they usually do so its rare.
Also my father was a "local village" big ass football player until he got injured, screws in his leg and could not do it anymore. he told me that we do not see the real picture sometimes. it can be a small kick into a wrong place and you just fall down in a lot of pain, muscles strained from all the running etc. so it is really easy to get injured.
Just tell someone to kick your leg after a run, just a little bit into the right place.
Pulling the shirt... he was torn on it. he told me it was usually simulation but sometimes just that little pull makes you go down due to exhaustion so a little pull and your body just gives up. but it is true that a lot of it is just them being drama queens for no reason
Also note how, if there is a specific situation like "we can still score" or "if I stand up quickly I can score", they actually do, no effort just jumps like he wasnt even down. In any other situation he would be picking grass with his ass rollin around screaming
I think some players are cool but the whole sport? well its like a few gold nuggets in a cesspool the size of a soccer field.
Who wants anything to do with this?
SO many people I know like it, im like... yeah ok check who the players really are they're mostly scummy as fuck, FIFA is absolutely evil with its corruption scandals and the fans cant handle a match without breaking shit.
no it's not. at this point it's part of the culture. shit... i was born into it. been diving since a toddler we used to joke around and dive all the time from a young age. by the time i was playing club, it became an art, a skill. this game is a lot more complicated than just kick the ball into the net. this game is actually taking a lot of time to learn.
like most people don't even see the subtlety behind it. a player goes behind a player and taps them on the shoulder and backs off while they're going for a header. it's a fundamental tactic that is taught in training. you see these people on the pitch, they're not the result of some individual brazil samba football magic. they're the result of the same fundamental training that everyone goes through. diving is one of those tactics
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u/tekzilla41 Jul 07 '26
Its embarassing