Poor sportsmanship in competition: I'm sick of it

When watching the little bit of the world cup that I did watch this year I, like many Americans, kind of groaned at the amount of acting and drama that takes place on a field when certain players are looking to get a free kick in an advantageous position. It is pretty amazing to me that this still goes on and while VAR will probably start to help in limiting a lot of this, it isn't stopping people from intentionally cheating to get a call that they want. I don't think many of these instances have resulted in changed the outcome of a game but there have been some that were close.

I'm not going to insult entire nationalities by calling any specific country out that does this on a regular basis, but you know who you are and therefore I don't have to.

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There were times that we would be watching some replay of a play where nothing actually was called and it seems like almost everyone on the field is at the minimum pulling a shirt of someone else on the field. This is almost never committed against the keeper though, because just like a kicker in American football, that position is heavily protected by the officials.

Now I want to think back to my own time in football / soccer in high school when I was considered to be very good at it. I would cheat a little bit, but only in a way to get the people who were marking me really worked up and then have them commit a bad foul because of this anger and then get sent off or get us a free kick. Other people would do this to me but honestly, those jedi mind tricks don't work on me and I would tell them exactly that at certain points and they would laugh and move on to a different guy with that tactic.

When I started to compete at higher and higher levels though I started to see an entirely new level of cheating being introduced into the game such as throwing handfuls of dirt into the face of people who were marking someone then attempting to claim that it didn't happen to the official even though the guy's face is covered in dirt. Conversely, I have seen someone throw dirt all over their own face and try to claim that the defender did that to him. There was lots of smacking of the groin / balls area when the officials' backs were turned and of course, plenty of shirt pulling.

In all of the sports that I played, this really didn't happen a great deal in any of the sports I played other than football / soccer. I played baseball, American football, soccer, swimming, and also basketball. I don't recall any of these sports having the level of cheating kind of built into the game that soccer did.

Keep in mind that I live in the USA and when I was experiencing this it was the 90's and early 2000's. USA didn't really take football / soccer very seriously back then so I wonder how much the cheating has become a part of the game for the youth of today.

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_{despite the obviously "agonizing pain," these guys almost always get straight back up.}

I would like to see these sorts of fouls penalized a lot more harshly than they are but I can't think of any way that we would actually be able to do that seeing as how not every game has the opportunity for VAR which I would imagine is hugely expensive. I do think that it should be widely used at the minimum, at high profile games like championships, cups, and of course at the World Cup. I would like to take it a step further than they do and issue fines and / or yellows after the games to people caught on tape that are obviously cheating. That way we can appease the apologists who claim that VAR is slowing down the pace of play and also appease people like me that are sick and tired of dirty tactics affecting the outcome of matches.

What do you think?