Soccer is my favorite sport to watch and also to play. There is so much I love about the sport. The fact that it is truly a global sport is wonderful, and it can be played in any country or place as long as one has a ball and the will to play.
I love how the game has a continuous clock and, in professional leagues, teams have a specific number of players they can sub-in and sub-out. I love the free-form nature of the sport and how different a team can be just by changing the formation.
However, one thing I despise about the sport is the art of flopping or diving.
Flopping is when a player acts like they got pushed or fouled and falls down, looking like they are hurt when they are really not. This part of the game comes about because of the free-form nature of the sport. It is easy for a referee to not see what is actually happening on the play, especially with how big the field is and to have to call what he thinks happened.
As a fan of the sport, I dislike this type of play because it goes against my favorite parts of the game.
Even as a Barcelona fan, one of the worst flops was during the second leg of the Paris Saint-Germain Champions’ League match last season, where Luis Suarez grabbed for his neck and was clearly just flopping. I watched as my team won the game with a goal they didn’t really deserve.
When I used to play soccer in high school, I was a defender, and it was the worst thing when I played the forward the right way, but then would get called for a foul only because the offensive player thought it would be a good idea to act like I fouled them.
I understand there isn’t really a way to enforce this, because sometimes it is difficult to know whether a player actually did get fouled or not, but other times, it is easy to know a player didn’t actually get fouled, and I hate that about that game.
I don’t like hating things about my favorite sport. I want to enjoy the game from start to finish, and when I see my own team’s player flopping, I don’t jump for joy. I shake my head in disappointment.
