Is Soccer Flopping Its Way Out Of America’s Favor?

The pitch was uneven and poorly maintained. The referees were loath to call most fouls, even the hard ones, so the players dug into one another. The player wearing 20 for the away team and the player wearing 2 for the home team quickly developed a grudge, despite never having met before, constantly slamming into one another, subtly shoving, not-so-subtly shoving, and tackling. Each was called for fouls, but no yellow or red cards were pulled from the referee’s back pocket. At no point did either player take a dive or dramatize the severity of their falls; instead, they popped back up and plowed right back into the battle.

On the drive home, number 20 commented that number 2 was wearing the correct number, because she was a turd. Such was a Saturday when one of your daughters played competitive soccer. Such was the commentary when the player was nine years old, I think, at the time of that match. Even then, though, there was one glaring difference between those little girls and the men who played in the pros: the little girls hated taking dives and flopping about as the professional men are wont to do.

It wasn’t specific to my daughter’s club, and this isn’t about girl power, but the art of the flop is perhaps an under-discussed aspect of why soccer hasn’t taken off in the United States. We already have one professional sport in which players are rewarded for flopping — the NBA. We don’t need another, even if the soccer players have a patina of logic to their predilection for thrashing about on the ground like someone just removed one of their vital organs with a spork.

FIFA has attempted to address this, but it remains too averse to simply stopping the clock, which is ridiculous. As such, players remain incentivized to flopping about instead of staying engaged in battle. There’s also the truth that stoppage is imprecise, no matter what the governing bodies claim. Anyone who has watched the sport on any level has held their breath as their team drives for that last chance to win — or tie, since ties are okay in soccer, which is a whole other matter — only to hear the final three blows of the whistle just as the offense was advancing toward the opponent’s goal.

Apologists for the current system will point out that NFL players also find ways to kill time. Rather than pointless passing, they’ll run the ball to keep the clock moving. They can also kneel at the end of the game. Football teams also play to win, and it’s unseemly to run up the score on a team that’s already lost. Also, football players suffer many more injuries than soccer players, so they don’t need to feign them.

That is, male football players suffer more injuries than male soccer players. The concussion rate for girls who play soccer is higher than that of boys. (Number 20 had at least three before retiring to focus on choir.) So not only are the girls flopping less, but they’re getting injured more.

Not that concussions are something to be celebrated. Head injuries are bad, and maybe the girls need to learn a little something from the boys about being more focused on self-preservation, though when they get kicked in the head (third concussion) while stopping a goal (no call), that’s when the refs need to remember that one of their jobs, at least in youth sports, is to protect the youth.

Encouraging more toughness in soccer might not directly help American teams win or boost widespread interest in the sport. As a country, we may not have the capacity for another sport to become truly popular. However, that shouldn’t stop us from trying. The United States Women’s National Team is the most successful in World Cup history, and its players rarely spend time on the ground. They stay on their feet, inspiring young girls to look up to them, even as men’s teams often expect boys to keep their eyes on the ground.

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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4