at least for the US sports fan.

1 - There is no attribute in our athletes we value more than toughness. There is nothing that makes you look like a weenie more than faking like you had an appendectomy with a chainsaw in order to draw a foul. In effect, soccer is a sport being played by 11 punters...the one position in the major sports we will poke fun at for their lack of toughness.

2 - Then there is the risk/reward. If you take a dive to draw a foul in basketball, it will at most swing the game by 2 points, which, even for a slogfest UVA basketball game, is still going to be at most 2% of the scoring. The success or failure of one flop isn't that big of a deal. Even a roughing the kicker penalty is only 15 yards out of the several hundred yards of offense in a typical football game.

But in soccer, a single penalty kick has a good chance of being somewhere between 30% - 100% of the scoring. An awful lot of soccer games end somewhere between 0-0 and 2-1. A single opportunity to score a cheap goal is HUGE. If there were some way to tweak the rules so a typical international soccer match scored somewhere in the 7-5 neighborhood (instead of 1-0), that might make flopping a little less attractive.