yeso soccer fans have obviously made their peace with flopping, but speaking as another american who has tried over the years to watch the sport, it’s just totally out of control in the men’s game lol. Just impossible for me to take any of them seriously at all. Is the rest of the world just blind to how absurd this behavior is?
What’s funny about this complaint is all the recent refereeing rules that favored flopping were brought to the game specifically for the 1994 World Cup in the USA, as FIFA (rightfully) worried the game was getting way too violent and that dangerous tackles and injuries were severely slowing down games (and favoring harsh defenses) as well as cutting brilliant careers short, which made the sport hard to enjoy casually for Americans.
🫵 You’re the people who hated ↓ this football, not us!
The #1 reason Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were able to break all these scoring records and have such long careers is that, until the mid90’s, players of their ilk would always get their career (literally) cut short by defenders put on the pitch to break their legs.
Referees are now admittedly too lenient in the other direction and overprotect attacking players by giving their dives the benefit of the doubt, in the same way that QBs get maybe too many advantages over defense in modern American Football, but I’ll begrudgingly admit – in both cases – it’s probably better for the spectacle and for the life of these athletes.
The luck for new fans like @HeavenlyHalberd is that active top level (and influential) coaches like Guardiola and Klopp and De Zerbi, standing on the shoulders of innovators like Cruyff, Sacchi, Bielsa and Wenger, have made recent high level club football a way faster, physical and innovative sports in terms of team tactics.
It’s a joy to watch contemporary collective club football thanks to these coaches, and the way they make their team play football relies so little on individual performance / one-on-one dribbling that there is actually very little space for flopping with their teams.
There is more flopping in national team games because it’s much harder for national teams to develop modern high level football with so few games and opportunities to practice (which is why the FA is ill-advised to want Guardiola at the helm of the English National Team). As a result, individual performance and 1-on-1 situations are way more prevalent, which makes flopping much more valuable.
