Diving In Soccer Needs To Be Eliminated

Here's the video link to Fred's dive yesterday (Photo taken by Thanassis Starakis)

Alright, I am going to tackle a subject that is very near and dear to my heart...flopping in sports. If you are an avid soccer fan like I am, it's something that has gotten all too prevalent in recent years. As many people often remark, "people do it because it's effective for winning fouls and/or goals". Although that is true, punching opposing players in the face to leave them bleeding on the floor also aids your team in scoring goals, but I guess surprisingly enough, you don't see people do that all that regularly!! Why would that be I wonder?? Why would one action which achieves the same end result as another action be some much more commonplace in sport?!? I'll tell you why. One of them you'll get banned and/or fined for and the other will simply get you a bad reputation and some pundit finger-wagging until the next influential dive and he takes the spotlight. It's absolute incomprehensible garbage!!

I'm tired of watching the sport of love and care so much about be tarnished by these classless buffoons that go down with their arms raised yelling at the ref about a foul that never happened. Yesterday in the World Cup kick-off match between Brazil and Crotia, Brazil's incredibly mediocre forward Fred (yes, that is really his name) threw himself down in the box to a supposed foul from Croatian defender Dejan Lovren. You can watch the flop at he link below the top picture. Not only did this non-existent foul award Brazil with a penalty which completely changed the game, but it also caused Lovren to receive a yellow card which could cause him to miss a match later in the tournament. And how will FIFA likely deal with this incident? By shrugging it off and letting this issue perpetuate as usual. And it's not like FIFA is opposed to instilling swift decisive judgement on wrongdoers. All you have to do is look to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa where FIFA helped set up 56 special courts throughout South Africa for the month long tournament which dealt with everyone from muggers to Dutch women wearing orange dresses advertising a beer that wasn't Budweiser (it's official sponsor).

So how can we go about solving this seemingly unavoidable problem? Punish the players flopping!!! It really is as simple as that!! Do the same thing that every other sporting organization on the planet does. Review the video and punish the cheating pieces of crap until they're more scared of the punishment then they are desiring the motivation to cheat. It's a simple cost analysis problem. If every time a player is caught with video evidence of flopping for a call, fine them $10,000. That will get their attention quickly for the second transgression, fine them $30,000. And on a third or fourth time, fine them and give them a game's suspension!! It can't be any simpler than that. Every European league already does it with any sort of violent conduct. Why should diving not be enforced the same way?! Luis Suarez is 2013 got an 8-match ban as well as a £40,000 fine for biting Branislav Ivanovic's arm. I guarantee you he won't be trying that stunt anytime soon.

Luis Suarez biting Branislav Ivanovic

This really is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Not only does it cheaper our beautiful game, but for us Americans it just makes it that much harder to gain respect and grow as a sport within our country. We already have a bad reputation as a pansy non-athletic sport to most of America, please don't give them even more reason to believe that.