Meh. Sure, some players dive, and it’s not part of the game that fans are drawn too, but at the same time it’s not a big deal and I don’t think it calls for the boo hoo hoo that the OP and many other Americans that don’t like football often display.
It’s a shame, I think, that so many of the threads here that are about football end up being some stupid dispute between people who don’t know too much about the game and don’t like it but like to complain about it on one side, and fans defending the game on the other.
I don’t think that American athletes in any sport attain levels of sportsmanship that are necessarily higher than football players do. There’s some horrible examples of cheating and deceit, but also great examples of people going back onto the pitch with broken bones (which is part dedication, part stupidity). On the whole, it’s all about the incentives and conditions that people are placed under.
For one thing, in contrast to american football and hockey, football players wear next to no padding - only some shin protection, but nothing other than that. That means that the impact of any charge is going to be much bigger in football than it would be in american football.
Secondly, football is predominantly a technical sport which means that it attracts a lot of athletes that are smaller and weaker, and comparatively fewer goons with a lot of physical strength. Take a look at the Barcelona players, for instance - all tiny scraggly little dudes, but horribly talented nimble fuckers at the same time. But yeah, when someone body checks them, it’ll hit them harder than some 6’6" 270 lbs American Football Player, and they don’t get up right away. Still, it’s them we want to see play, and it’s that type of players that need to be protected from suffering career ending injuries at the hands of ruthless defenders. Think of Marco van Basten - great player, but he pretty much spent the last few years of his career in an out of surgery trying to fix his ankle, retiring at age thirty after having been sidelined for the good part of the three or four years prior to that.
So thirdly: the rules tend to favor the attackers and stifle heavy-handed defending - because of cases like Van Basten’s. It’s things like this that are the reason that a lot of charges are often heavily penalized and defenders easily get punished even when they did not mean any harm but were unlucky in starting a sliding just a fraction of a second too late. And yeah - a lot of players take advantage of the rules being that way. This is not right, but there’s good reasons that the rules are the way they are.
All of this to say - whenever I see people on this board and elsewhere whining and moaning over diving in football, I pretty much just think ‘you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’.
