​Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Take a stand for historical accuracy this week.Let’s talk about soccer this week and how a few subtle rule changes made Americans fall in love with the game and obsess over the World Cup. We’ll close with some thoughts on the Home Run Derby and how MLB is missing out on its full potential.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut first, we’re going to do another one of our “Let’s fix [insert sport here]” surveys, this time focusing on soccer. Feel free to weigh in with any ideas you have for fixing the sport, or just take 10 seconds to vote on the VAR question.A black woman is suing Citi Field for racial discrimination—because security forced her to take off her MAGA hat, while white attendees were allowed to wear theirs.New academic study pretty much confirms that NBA teams play much worse on the second night of a back-to-back.WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert got torched online for canceling an interview with Dan Patrick so she could practice her golf swing.I love soccer play-by-play caller Ian Darke—but when the national debt is $31.7 trillion, we absolutely do not need the U.S. government to subsidize youth soccer. (That’s what wealthy philanthropic billionaires are for!)A similarly awful idea: Making new golfers obtain a license to play.Speaking of Norway, their much-vaunted youth sports model is falling apart.Two new sports are getting added to the 2030 Winter Olympics, but one sport is getting canceled. (Also, Russia might be back.)Las Vegas is spending $100 million in taxpayer funds over a decade to sponsor the Formula 1 Grand Prix there.Elsewhere in Reason: “The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers”This is American exceptionalism:When you think of the typical American soccer hater, they probably have the same few complaints: “The players are all drama queens, they just flop around all the time!”, “There’s so much time wasting because the clock goes on and on,” and “There’s never any scoring, and nobody wants to watch a draw, especially not a scoreless one.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementFIFA, it seems, heard these complaints and did its best to fix them before the 2026 World Cup came to America. As far as I can tell, it’s worked. Just look at this post from a popular golf account:(That’s a stark contrast in attitude from this popular soccer journalist.)Referees have always been allowed to give out yellow cards for flopping (or “simulation,” as the rulebook calls it). But now the video-assistant referee (VAR) can help the referee spot a flop in certain situations.This goes hand-in-hand with one of several rule changes to cut down on time-wasting. If anyone gets hurt badly enough that they call for the medics to come on the field to treat them, they have to leave the field for at least 1 minute (there are several exceptions, though). While previously you might have a player flop down and call for medical treatment to waste time late in a game, now a pla