Minnesota United FC midfielder Jeb Brovsky is Exhibit A in the counterargument that soccer players are soft. With history of a snapped leg, wrenched shoulder and smashed nose, his X-rays back it up.
On May 28, Brovsky suffered a severely separated shoulder in the Loons’ 2-0 loss to Tampa Bay. With his clavicle bouncing when running, coaches asked if he could stay in the game. He said yes while his substitute limbered up.
Playing for the Major League Soccer club Montreal Impact in 2013, Brovsky broke his nose in six spots during an aerial duel against Vancouver. Bloodied, he stuffed gauze up his nose, finished the game and went to the hospital afterward.
“My nasal passages are still messed up because they took a steel bar and put it back,” Brovsky said. “That was the most barbaric thing I’ve done.”
The popularity of soccer has long suffered under the stereotype that its players aren’t as tough as athletes in other sports. Football fans, for instance, roll their eyes when some soccer players get clipped on the heel by an opponent, embellish like they’ve severed their Achilles, only to continue playing within moments. Going down without any contact, or flopping, is a worse offense in Brovsky’s eyes.
“That’s the stuff I can’t handle,” said Brovsky, a Colorado native who snapped the tibia in his leg when playing at age 14.
Brovsky, who joined United in March after playing for three MLS expansion clubs since 2012, said if he saw players wearing Minnesota’s black and blue do such a thing, he would address it head on.
“If there were any guys that did that on this team, a lot of us would have a problem with it,” said Brovsky, 27. “We would tell them in the locker room that we don’t do it. I think it’s a character thing. Some teams do it, and some teams don’t.”
Declining surgery for his Grade 3 separated shoulder, Brovsky rehabbed and contested coach Carl Craig’s decision to sit him out of the U.S. Open Cup match against MLS team Sporting Kansas City on June 15.
Besides Brovsky, fellow newcomer and MLS veteran Danny Cruz has played through a foot injury against Indy Eleven on May 21. He hurt it in the 10th minute, left the game in the 70th and missed the following week’s game against Tampa Bay. “I’ve fought through it, and I’ve been getting shots” for the pain, he said.
Craig said Brovsky and Cruz could have been tempted to rest in their accomplishments as MLS players, keeping an eye on United’s slated move from the North American Soccer League to MLS in 2017.
“It would be easy to just say (forget) it: ‘I’m MLS; I’ve been MLS,’ ” Craig said. “But both of them are banging and making sure that we see the right results.
“In the past we’ve had guys here that would be very happy lying on the bed and picking up a paycheck,” said Craig, a Minnesota assistant coach from 2010-15. “But right now I don’t have anyone like that. That’s good.”
Comparing collegiate sports, soccer players reported higher than average injury rates, according to a Centers for Disease Control study in 2015. Men’s soccer players were injured at a rate of 8.0 per 1,000 exposures. Women’s soccer had a rate of 8.4, with the all-sport average at 6.0. Wrestling had the highest injury rate at 13.1, with men’s hockey at 9.5 and football 9.2.
Cruz, a running back in football during his high school days in Arizona, said the physical play of soccer produces the same next-day soreness as getting hit on every play in a football game.
“I woke up Thursday after the Kansas City game, and I could barely walk,” he said. “I put every bit of energy that I had into that game. You add the physicalness to the running part, and people don’t understand that it’s brutal.”
When Cruz played in the Texas heat with MLS’s Houston Dynamo, multiple players would inject intravenous fluids at halftime.
“We would have four or five guys with IVs because you are just losing so much fluid,” said Cruz, 26.
FLIP-FLOPPING: STRATEGY OR CHEAP MOVE?
One routine argument to the premise soccer players are soft is they flop to the ground on phantom contact or easily go to the ground after an opponent’s slight touch.
On the latter gripe, there are both tactical and cultural explanations.
On the strategic level, soccer obviously has less scoring than other sports, so moments have higher importance. It’s worthwhile for a player to show that contact disrupted their attack because they could draw a yellow card on an opponent, induce a free kick in the attacking one-third of the field or a potential game-changer with a penalty kick on goal.
“As long as you are not breaking the law,” Craig said. “You drive your car in a 50-mile-an-hour zone, you don’t have to drive at 49. Drive at 50; that’s what it says. It doesn’t say you have to be extra cautious, if you stay within the confines of the law. Some of those laws are ambiguous, especially in soccer.”
Doug Marshak, Minnesota State Director of Referee Instruction for six years, said assessing the level of contact is an important criterion when teaching advanced officials to call matches.
“We are seeing kids trying to win free kicks or penalty kicks as young as the (under-13-year-old division), and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it at U12 and U11 because there are competitive divisions there,” Marshak said. “I have no doubt that there are coaches out there that are teaching kids to make the referee make a decision.”
Marshak doesn’t see players going down for light contact and hoping for a call to be a scrounge to the game. He even teaches his own soccer-playing children to ply for a ref’s call.
Woodbury Soccer Club’s director of youth coaching Peter Rivard, also a United assistant coach, said the tactical effort to force a referee’s decision comes in at the U17 and U18 levels. His message to youth players on teams he oversees is to encourage them to get up soon after going down. Whining won’t get you anywhere, he said.
Forcing the referee to make a decision if there’s some contact (or not) has long been a part of soccer in other countries, especially Central and South America.
“From a (U.S.) standpoint, people see the sport as something that shouldn’t be tarred by gamesmanship,” Marshak said. “That has always been a criticism of the U.S. men’s national team is that they play the game too honestly. I think our culture is very adverse to what people will classify as cheating. But it is part of the game.”
Soccer isn’t isolated here, either. Basketball has been dealing with increasing instances of players trying to draw offensive foul calls by flopping to the floor. The NBA has set up warnings and fines for such conduct.
“It becomes a much more nuanced discussion of why flopping has occurred,” said United sporting director Manny Lagos. “I think soccer has been around longer than basketball. I think basketball is just now going through the reality of gaining an edge in a game and ultimately, because soccer is such a global game, they view flopping differently.”
To a much lesser degree in football, wide receivers sometimes initiate contact or stop running and throw their hands into the air to draw a defensive pass interference penalty.
Cruz doesn’t like flopping, though he admits he might be guilty of it once in a while. But if there’s a little contact that disrupts his attack to the net, he’s all in on going down.
“If I’m in the penalty spot or I’m 20 yards out and I feel something, it would be stupid of me to not go down there from a tactical standpoint,” Cruz explained. “I don’t agree with flopping. I know that sounds hypocritical, but for me, there is a difference there.”
To help address ambiguity in awarding penalties, the sport’s governing body, FIFA, is testing out Video Assistant Referees (VARs) for some upcoming matches. In addition to goals scored and cards distributed, refs will review actions that led to penalty and non-penalty kicks.
“There are some people that believe that this is an old-fashioned game and this is how it should be played, but I think that times are definitely changing,” Cruz said. “Guys are getting trickier, smarter. That’s reality.”