A quest to answer a casual fans question: Why dont soccer players wear protective cups?

August 28, 2024

This story began when a round of drinks took a juvenile turn.

One of our editors was discussing some of the more gruesome injuries he had seen in hockey. He could not avoid the inevitable: instances of players taking a shot between the legs.

Thankfully, they wear protective cups to soften the blow.

“If you think that’s bad,” I offered, “imagine how much it would hurt taking a soccer ball or a boot without a cup.”

“Why don’t soccer players wear cups?” my editor asked.

“Well,” I began. I was going to launch into a poetic diatribe about the beautiful game, and how the lack of player equipment allows magicians like Lionel Messi to move gracefully with every run.

But he cut me off, eager to go onto the next horrific injury hockey players are subject to.

“Let’s write that story,” he said.

That was how I found myself talking to Toronto FC defender Eriq Zavaleta, tiptoeing the fine line between an awkward question and an invasive one: “So, this probably isn’t going to win me a Pulitzer, but why aren’t you interested in protecting your genitals during a game?”

You could have crushed walnuts between his furrowed brow.

I think three things went through Zavaleta’s head when he heard my question.

1. This is not something I’ve thought about.

2. What reason could Kloke possibly be asking me this for?

3. And, finally, I’m so thankful I don’t have to wear a cup.

His rationale was simple: Zavaleta thinks he’s only been hit by a ball or a boot hard enough in the testicles just once or twice in MLS.

“The comfort level of wearing one of those things doesn’t outweigh the risk,” said Zavaleta.

Maybe Zavaleta had not spent hours researching videos and stories of athletes being hit in the balls by balls like I had. The following examples stood out, as they were the ones which elicited an actual groan during my research.

In 2011, Blackburn Rovers defender Scott Dann ruptured his testicle after colliding with West Bromwich Albion goalkeeper Ben Foster and missed six weeks.

“It’s even more painful than it sounds,” Dann said after the injury.

Later that season, English midfielder Chris Whelpdale suffered a split scrotum after a challenge with midfielder David Hunt.

Whelpdale said afterward he would wear a protective cup.

In 2017, various outlets reported Bosnian defender Marin Galic required surgery to remove a testicle after taking a kick from an opposition defender to his member.

These are all injuries that a protective cup could prevent – or at least minimize.

But Zavaleta, like other players, is happy to simply play the odds: The chance of injury is too rare to add to the equipment they already wear.

“If you get kicked hard enough in that area, you’ll wear a cup and you won’t care,” said Zavaleta. “But until that happens to me, and until that happens to a lot of guys, we’ve got a lot of equipment on already so let’s not wear even more.”

Not wearing protective cups means many soccer players are likely unaware of advancements in the equipment. They’re lighter, and with different sizes, they’re made to fit better than ever before.

Former MLB pitcher Mark Littell founded a cup company called NuttyBuddy, which sells various cups and compression shorts. In 2018, he told USA Today that “People don’t really know how to wear these products. They seem to throw a cup down there and think it should be worn loose.’’

Maybe I just needed a veteran voice. Someone who’d played the game long enough to understand these types of injuries can occur, and that it’s always better to play it safe, right?

TFC defender Drew Moor is among the many players I spoke to who said, compared to other athletes, protective cups would restrict soccer players’ movement.

“We like to have a bit more freedom,” said Moor.

But didn’t Moor know what’s at stake when not wearing a cup? And didn’t he know how hard it is to get a urologist to return your call when your question is about protective cups?

Dr. R. Houston Thompson, a urologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said for any athlete who is interested in having children, he would recommend wearing a protective cup.

“What they’re putting themselves at risk for when not wearing a protective cup is testicular loss, and there are hormonal implications of that, especially if both testicles are injured, and there are fertility implications of that,” said Thompson.

Being a father to two boys — with no plans on having any more children — Moor no longer has those concerns.

“I know some people that’ve gotten it very bad and have had to get some stuff changed around down there,” said Moor, pointing to his shorts. “Fortunately, I have two kids now though so I wouldn’t think about (wearing a protective cup) too much anymore.”

As an organization, TFC are more concerned with injury prevention than ever. Last season the club hired Kitman Labs to help parse the factors that can lead to injuries.

Surely this is an easy fix for one type of injury, no?

As if my search for the answer wasn’t making the good people in TFC’s media relations department agonized enough, I took my question to the club’s director of sports science.

According to Jim Liston, there isn’t a single protective cup to be found in the club’s equipment room.

Before joining TFC in the sport-science department, Liston worked as a strength and conditioning coach for LA Galaxy, Columbus Crew and Chivas USA. He can’t recall any player being forced to leave a game because of a testicular injury.

“It happens so infrequently that that’s probably why the players aren’t worried about it either,” said Liston.

Maybe, I thought, there have been enough advancements in sports science to assuage the immediate pain of being hit in the testicles. I played competitive soccer until I was 18, and I’d taken my fair share of balls to the area.

“Walk it off,” my coaches would always say.

Surely testicle injury recovery has come a long way since then, right TFC head coach Greg Vanney?

“Shake it off,” Vanney said he tells his players. “The treatment is time and some sudden drops.”

But just walking off an injury to the testicles also presents a risk, the professionals warn.

“If it’s a misdiagnosis, and it often is, or it’s just left to be observed to see how it recovers on its own, we’re talking weeks, if not months of discomfort and morbidity,” said Dr. Ethan Grober, consulting urologist for TFC and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

A testicular rupture, according to Grober, is “the most significant organ-threatening injury that I think you can get from athletics.”

“In urology, there are very few medical emergencies,” Grober continued. “This would be one of them.”

Perhaps if soccer players had the conversations I did with the urologists, they might think differently about wearing a cup.

Vanney has never seen one of his players wear one. During his playing days, Vanney only remembers goalkeepers wearing them sporadically but never outfield players.

So the most likely candidate to wear a protective cup would then be TFC goalkeeper Alex Bono, right? I mean, in Bono’s estimation, a shot will take a strange bounce and land squarely in his groin area once every couple of weeks while training with Toronto FC. Bono will hit the ground in agony.

TFC goalkeeper coach Jon Conway will check in with a “You all right, guy?”

A few minutes later, regardless of the pain, Bono will be back up in the net. He knows wearing a protective cup can prevent that pain. But he, like so many of his TFC teammates, won’t even entertain the idea.

“Do I wish that if I got hit, it didn’t hurt as bad?” Bono asked. “Yes. But at the end of the day, I’m risking that for the comfort and the mobility during a game.

“The different movements you have in soccer, it’s not necessarily a comfortable piece of equipment to wear.”

He demonstrated by motioning a swinging kick from right to left.

Hearing the conviction in Bono’s answer, and the fact that every other player I’d spoken to was on his side, I knew soccer players couldn’t be convinced. It didn’t matter that every urologist I spoke to believed that players would be better off wearing cups.

Soccer players are firmly anti-protection, even if the evidence suggests they should be otherwise.

My editor might not be convinced either. He probably thinks this whole debate is still strange. I can’t blame him. If only I had one simple, obvious explanation that didn’t require Googling “Urologists in Toronto” so much that every online advertisement now makes me shudder.

“Also,” said Bono towards the end of our awkward conversation, “it would kind of look a bit weird in the shorts, I think.”

Finally, an answer everyone can relate to.

(Photo: Julian Avram/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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