When I played
soccer in
high school, our coach stressed upon us that we shouldn't
swear, because referees in our league were particularly strict about it and gave out
red cards for swearing. If we needed to swear, he said, we should yell "Scheiße!", as it was a
German word that the referees were unlikely to know.
Well guess what... just about everybody knows what Scheiße means, and even if they don't, when you hear kids yelling it after they muff a kick, or get the ball tackled away, or get scored upon, you tend to pick up on it pretty quick.
Having said that, we never even got so much as a yellow card for it. Then again, our coach called foreign players on other teams "internationals" (As in, "Watch out, this team has a lot of internationals!"), and recommended that someone learn Spanish so that we could figure out the 'code' that opposing players were using. Maybe he was a bit too obsessed with foreign languages...