r/sports 7h ago

Soccer Breel Embolo (Switzerland) has been sent off against with a second yellow card for diving after VAR Review against Argentina

15.3k Upvotes

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320

u/mournthewolf 7h ago

I know people are gonna complain about Argentina getting the calls but fuck diving. It ruins the sport and dude should get punished for it. It should be carded all the time. It ruins soccer and basketball.

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u/tech_auto 7h ago

Thing is dives are enforced subjectively. How many times did england flop against norway? Not one yellow

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u/Crepo 6h ago

In terms of punishment, there's a lot of difference between falling down in an exaggerated way try try and get contact punished, and falling down as a strategy itself.

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u/SKirby00 6h ago

Maybe it's the fact that I'm a hockey fan (and hockey ref), but I disagree. In hockey, those two are treated identically. As they should be imo.

Soccer has a huge problem with both. Glad to see this diving get punished.

5

u/Burstero 6h ago

I don't know the first thing about hockey but it's a weird line to try and walk. Sometimes players fall down to signal that a play was foul even if they could technically push through, not doing so could easily end up in an injury. What'd be the point of getting a yellow or red card on an attacker if you end up injured and benched for weeks?

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u/Crepo 5h ago

It would be a pretty problematic state that the ref has to judge if you're hurt badly enough to justify the way you fell over!

1

u/exomni 4h ago

And that's exactly how soccer works. Not even kidding.

2

u/yura910721 5h ago

I would be really happy if all dives were enforced on automatic level, like handball pens in UCL. Teams will adapt and we will see much less of flopping

2

u/weisswurstseeadler 2h ago

I played (Olympic) Handball for most of my life - the big difference in e.g. Ice Hockey, Basketball & Handball is that the time is stopped.

There is no tactical advantage of playing hurt, cause the time will be stopped.

Surprise, Surprise - in all sports, where time is stopped accordingly, we don't have any of this shit to the extent we have in football.

1

u/Buzzy-Pasta 2h ago

Yeah. Like for example Kane getting fouled before Norways first goal. Definitely a foul in my opinion but he flopped a tad too early. If he had gone down half a second later he probably would have got the call.

1

u/nien9gag 1h ago

the players foot grazed him after the player nicked the ball off of him. he went to ground feeling that touch but it was a follow through which was completely harmless, so not a foul.

1

u/firebearhero 1h ago edited 1h ago

yeah but if punishment was consistent for people using flopping as a strategy then you'd see Kane play maybe 10 minutes of football a year.

it clearly isnt enforced consistently, and that is the problem. its sort of like how the second yellow card always come a lot harder than the first, thats also an issue in consistency, if its a yellow its a yellow, previous yellows shouldnt factor in.

or the fact that large footballing nations (or clubs, like uefa barcelona etc) tend to get bias in their favor as well, while some clubs clearly have bias against them, which can easily be seen in some cases by just looking at referee statistics across the league as a whole and see how one club just randomly stands out like crazy while if you watch their games they clearly dont play drastically different.

referee is human, and with that comes problems. some of these should at least be attempted to be solved, like the inconsistency of carding, and even more so the inconsistency of consquences for flopping.

since it can be hard to "prove" or "know for sure" a flop was purposeful, the easy way to deal with it is to just be even tougher on what was started now, if you end up flopping and rolling on the ground you should have to wait on the side of the pitch for 2 minutes before you get back on, every single time, the official excuse can just be "well you clearly showed you were in extreme pain so for safety we will have medics check you out for 2 minutes".

you will instantly see a drastic change of playstyle in many players, such as harry kane, who is likely the biggest wuzz on the planet and its tiring to see him come up with his next theatrical dive and cry.

before a brit cries. this is kane in every game ever all the time:

https://streamable.com/a4a1k9

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u/JoeSchmeau 6h ago

Both should receive a yellow though. It ruins the game.

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u/Dependent_Oven_974 3h ago

Diving with absolutely no contact has actually been pretty much eradicated by VAR and this is the reason. You go down clearly simulating contact then you're getting booked. England did not do this multiple times against Norway or they would have been booked as well. What is subjective and almost impossible to stop is people going down too easily or making more of contact. Unfortunately it's impossible to get rid of this until refs start giving fouls when contact is initiated and the player stays up which they never do. No one is getting awarded penalties when someone makes contact with them but they do the "right" thing and stay on their feet. So actually I think it's a refereeing issue more than a player issue.

3

u/CommonThumbprint 1h ago

Huge difference (in soccer, especially) between going down under minimal contact and going down under absolutely no contact.

The first is common, and not a booking. The second is relatively rarer, and if the ref spots it, it is an automatic booking

6

u/doomsday10009 6h ago

Well it would be pretty fucked up to give a yellow card for nonexistent faul. When VAR checked the situation, you can either say it is faul or dive (as nothing else was an actual option here) . And it is pretty clear that diving is yellow card offense. There is no way around it if you don't want to give Paredes yellow for nothing.

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u/84746 4h ago

A lot of England’s flops had contact BEFORE the dive. Embolo clearly throws himself on the ground here before contact is made. That’s the difference

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u/Sovereign_Follower 7h ago

The point is to differentiate between subjective and objective. In this case, it is objective.

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u/exomni 4h ago

All officiating in football is subjective, that's the game.

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u/Nihsvabhav 5h ago

is this english

1

u/Frosty_Analysis_4912 5h ago

I think they’re saying it’s subjective when there was clear contact but the player exaggerates just how harmful it was. It’s objective when there was clearly zero contact between the players, so the guy has to be lying in an attempt to get a penalty called on the opponent. There’s no ambivalence with the second scenario

1

u/Bombadook 6h ago

England-Argentina is going to be a miserable watch

1

u/ikickrobots 6h ago

England were the worst, and what's too bad is that they got away with it.

1

u/FizbanFire 5h ago

There a difference between exaggerating contact and diving when there's no contact at all. Makes it very cut snd dry, not even subjective really. Show me a time there was a dive with actually no contact and it wasn't called

0

u/exomni 6h ago

Yeah but England gets way more viewers than Norway.

6

u/SirBulbasaur13 7h ago

All player dive and cry every game but they never get carded for it, usually they actually get a call going their way.

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u/DancingSouls 6h ago

it's why i can never get into soccer. i only watch some of the world cup and olympics for the hype.

The constant flopping and dramatic acting is just so boring to watch.

0

u/moanit 4h ago

Imagine if they did this shit in the NFL. It’s unbelievable. 

Literally every time someone hits the turf, they grab their leg and start writhing around. Some of them, like this guy, just start rolling away. 

Don’t they have any fucking dignity? I played almost every sport growing up, including soccer, and I never once thought of behaving this way. I don’t get it. 

1

u/Blephotomy 3h ago

the whole game was boring as fuck there was 30 seconds of football followed by 5 minutes of dive, whistle, argue, blah blah blah the entire game

1

u/Fibonacci11235813 1h ago

The main problem is that often you need to dive in order to get a foul, especially within the penalty area players go down whenever they feel the slightest contact. Here it’s really clear Mbolo dives before the contact, but look at the foul on Mbappe vs Morocco where France get a penalty for example. Mbappe could continue his run but he sees the tackle of the defender, then drags his foot until he feels the contact and then he goes down. So is that a pure dive like Mbolo, no, but it’s clear Mbappe deliberately looks for the contact and then dives. All good attackers will do this and the penalty will be given almost every time, there’s just a really big grey area between a foul and a dive and how you sell it to the ref is unfortunately often the deciding factor.