Quote Originally Posted by Phantom Warrior View Post
I have been an advocate for soccer for more than two decades, ever since my son joined the Bavarians at age nine. Both my son and my daughter played premier level club soccer and school soccer. My daughter played two years of D-3 college soccer before transferring to UW, and my son was recruited by several schools and was told he could play mid-major D-1 (though he gave up soccer after high school).

I coached soccer for 10 years at the school where I taught, and each year I came to appreciate the game more and more as I began to understand some of the game's nuances.

However, after watching about a half dozen World Cup games, my attitude about the sport - at least as it is played at the highest level - is changing. I will still watch the game Tuesday against Belgium, of course, but I am growing incredibly weary of watching players end up on the ground - often writhing in apparent agony - at least once every two or three minutes, and sometimes three or four times in a single minute.

If I had the patience, I would chart how many times a player ends up on the ground following contact with an opponent. My guess is the count would be somewhere around 50, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were much higher. Yes, the players are incredibly skilled, and they are extremely athletic. But I find the style of play almost unbearable to watch.

I enjoyed watching the U-17 Bavarians play the U-17 Brookfield Soccer Club team in 2000 much more than I've enjoyed watching the best soccer players in the world knock each other to the turf.
I call BS. You're saying 50 times a player goes down in a 90 minute match? I need to start charting this, but in the games I've watched, the number of stoppages for an injury appears to be 6-8, maybe 10 at most. Maybe a couple more over the weekend with the matches going 120 minutes. Do you have an issue with NFL and college football players going down? Those games have at least a couple of stoppages every game for an injury and studies have shown there is only about 15 minutes of action in a 60 minute football game. The ball is in play for nearly the entire 90 minutes in soccer. There are no automatic rests or substitutions like there are in other sports. You play the entire game. That will lead to the increase in fatigue and injuries. Do soccer players fake or embellish an injury? Of course they do. Is that any different than a football player that falls down to stop play? This isn't an anti-football post, I'm just trying to point out that it happens in other sports.