Respectfully disagree. I think if the offensive player just played through light (or even no) contact then the majority of the time they'd continue to maintain an advantageous position rather than killing a potential play or taking themselves unnecessarily out of a play by falling over for no reason. Frustrating to watch grown men act like sissies.
While I agree that sometimes players exaggerate incidental contact they shouldn't, the effect of light contact can be very deceiving.
First, in soccer, you can hit another player sending him flying and it might even not be a foul, according to the laws of the game. If a defender is attempting to fight for the ball, and uses shoulder to shoulder contact from the sides, and if the attacking player has at least one foot on the ground, it's not a foul even when the contact is quite violent. You might see it called by youth soccer officials. But normally, no contact like that would be called in professional or international matches.
So there is plenty of legal hard contact. However, there are several light-touch techniques, that are not legal, with which I make it much easier to dispossess you of the ball, or to unfairly interfere with your attempts to shoot or pass the ball. It is all about unbalancing a player unfairly vs. fairly.
You are talking about it as if it's a macho thing, where being fouled lightly and reacting is being a sissy. But it's not about manliness. It's about physics. And in soccer, physics makes it very easy to unfairly unbalance an attacking player because the attacking player is frequently on one foot while the other foot is busy with the ball.
Many of these light touch fouls can and do go unseen and uncalled by the ref. That gives defenders a huge advantage.
The attackers in soccer aren't out there to prove their manliness through suffering through light fouls. They are out there to win games. So if exaggerating light-contact, yet effective, fouls is necessary to get the ref to call some of them, then that's what the players have to do. Generally speaking, if an attacking player doesn't "help the ref" make the call, they won't ever make it as far as getting chosen to play on anybody's pro or international roster.
You don't see defenders doing it as much because, if they get it wrong and the ref doesn't call it, they leave their side in a numbers-down situation on the wrong end of the field and risk giving up a goal.
