I just finished watching the Women's World Cup semifinal football match, USA versus France, and am currently preparing to watch Japan versus Sweden and an important difference is immediately noticeable about womens' matches compared to men's.

A lot less flopping.

If you are not up on complex technical sports jargon, flopping is when, after a minor collision, you fall down and grasp a body part with a look of excruciating pain on your face, milk the drama to see if it draws a penalty and then look indignantly at the opposing team while you bravely resume as if nothing was wrong.   If you don't watch soccer, think NBA.

And I have noticed similar things in female and male basketball games - a lot less flopping.  Are the men just bigger and that means more injuries?   The laws of physics certainly say that bigger bodies colliding will mean more damage but, it turns out, I am not the first to notice this gender difference and wonder.   A  new study in the July issue of Research in Sports Medicine found the same result.  

The researchers examined videos of 47 televised games - important because a televised game is a greater amount of publicity and therefore pressure - from two international tournaments and logged incidents of contact where someone went to the ground.    They categorized injuries as 'definite' if a player left the game within five minutes after contact or if there was bleeding was visible while they listed all others as “questionable.”  They logged 270 apparent injuries, 5.74 per game, of which 0.78 were “definite” and 4.96 were “questionable”.

Obviously the questionable rate is six times the definite rate so flopping is not non-existent but they also found 11.26 injury incidents in men's soccer matches - twice as many - but the rate of 'definite' injuries was halved.  So women fake it, but men fake it a lot more.

“In the end, I think this study shows that women are less likely than men to fake soccer injuries,” said Daryl Rosenbaum, M.D., an assistant professor of Family and Community Medicine at Wake Forest Baptist. . “What isn’t clear is if injury simulation is used to gain a tactical advantage. Only the players themselves know the answer to that question.”

So does flopping work?  It certainly seems like it should work but it is the nature of psychology that we remember grievous events more than null results and if a penalty is drawn after a flop, it may be key but, if nothing results, it could easily be forgotten by fans or other players. Flopping can also work against a player if, as female soccer players contend, their culture is such that flopping is more frowned on than in the men's game - Brazilian defender Erika clearly flopped to run out the clock in Sunday's match versus the US and drew a yellow card for it.   The injury time was added on, the US tied the game and then won on penalty kicks.  So you see what I mean about remembering incidents if they turn out to be important.  If the US had not tied, no one would have pointed to Erika flopping as the game's turning point.

Julie Foudy, former US captain of the women's teams, told the New York Times that women do seem to have more integrity, if you put a positive spin on it, or less gamesmanship, if you don't put a positive spin on it, than men; "Men have a tendency to draw the foul much better than women...women play far too honest sometimes.  They take the hit, ride the tackle and stay on their feet.  I do think that will change."

Citation: Daryl A. Rosenbauma, Ravi R. Sanghani, Travis Woolen, Stephen W. Davis, 'Estimation of Injury Simulation in International Women's Football', Research in Sports Medicine
Volume 19, Issue 3, 2011 DOI:10.1080/15438627.2011.556523