Seems to me you've got a misguided viewpoint on what is 'soft' and what isn't.
Young people are just better at expressing their emotions, more developed than those who've been told their entire lives to keep a lid on it for....reasons. I'd be willing to bet inside everyone of the people thinking young people are soft, there's a little child wondering why the feck they're not allowed to feel what their body is telling them to and why they have to listen to other people's opinions rather than trusting themselves.
feck being 'ard. If you're not comfortable telling people how you feel then perhaps you wanna take a look at where that started and who told you not to do it.
Lots of assumptions in your post. Just because I am surprised at the willingness of grown men to cry so publicly, and often without grave cause, doesn’t mean I am advocating emotional repression. One can communicate or deal with their feelings without resorting to the most basic and infantile of all human coping mechanisms; crying. And I say infantile in the factual rather than derogatory sense.
You can read through my post history and see I have no issue telling people how I feel. Including having posted in the thread on child sexual abuse to discuss my feelings at being a male child sexual abuse survivor. Again, I can talk about these things in a productive and constructive way. Players crying because they got sent off, lost a game etc., is a completely different ball park of pain.
I don’t deny their right to cry, but i still remain surprised at how easily some of them do it. And in my opinion it has become symptomatic of the molly coddled nature of the modern footballer. Perhaps, as some other posters put it, it’s a generational thing. Then again, I’m only 38.
I’ll just reiterate, because this seems to be getting lost in translation. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong in crying. I cried when my dad died. I cried when I told my wife about what happened to me as a child. And I cried when I thought my wife was not going to make it out of 5 weeks in ICU and I’d have to raise our newborn daughter alone. Tbh, that’s probably it. And it’s not because I think I’ve been through more than others. Lives are messy, and most people have to deal with shit on that level or worse, at some point.
But anything other than these life changing, humanly tragic moments, it wouldn’t occur to me to cry. It’s the most infinitely juvenile response to a situation. A regression to a child like form. And I think as we see people become more detached from actual struggle, or the realities of the world, we see this regression at much earlier points on the agony curve. Take the diva type behaviours of pop, TV and film stars as an example. And I think we are seeing that in sports now. Footballers are increasingly doing less and less for themselves. The huge wealth meaning they are living in self created bubbles. The secret footballer wrote about this exact same thing. Some of them don’t know how to open a bank account or renew a license etc etc.
I’m sayjng that this complete culture change in modern football is responsible for a generation of “soft” players. Players used to earn their stripes, cleaning the locker rooms and boots of senior pros, earning their big contracts through time in the first team. Now you’ve got youth players making 50k a week based on potential alone. And their lives lived through social media and entourages of sycophants. It doesn’t give them any experiential grounding for developing coping mechanisms for the rigours of normal life. I think this is a shame.
Crying is a fundamental emotional outlet. An essential one for mental health. But it is also used an a manipulative device by some people, and as a regular coping mechanism for people with either little mental fortitude or a low level of emotional intelligence. Just as I think there is something wrong with people who are afraid to cry, I also think there’s something awry with people who cry too easily or regularly.
