Lamine Yamal scores. The crowd erupts. His teammates pile on for the usual hug. Then he peels away from them, raises both hands beside his head, drops to his knees, and lowers his forehead to the turf.
A commentator, somewhere, calls it kissing the pitch. It has been called that for years, by broadcasters who didn’t have another word ready. It is not what happened. Nobody’s lips touched the ground. What actually happened was older than football itself, and it has a name.
What sujud actually is
The position is called sujud, prostration. It is the same movement that occurs twice in every unit of the five daily prayers, the point in Islamic worship considered spiritually the highest a person can reach while physically the lowest they can be. Forehead down, palms down, knees down, saying quietly: Subhana Rabbiyal A’la. Glory be to my Lord, the Most High.
When it happens outside of the five daily prayers, spontaneously, in response to good news or relief from hardship, it has its own name: sujud ash-shukr, the prostration of gratitude. Scholars across the major schools of Islamic law recognize it as a recommended act, something a Muslim may do the instant something goes right, without needing to complete a full prayer first. Some schools ask that the person be in a state of ritual purity and facing the direction of the Kaaba to perform it fully; a majority of scholars hold that gratitude prostration, precisely because good news is unpredictable, does not require it. What every school agrees on is what it is not. It is not a kiss. It is not theater. It is the same act of submission a person performs in prayer, borrowed for a moment too large for words.
The moment the world actually watched
The 2026 World Cup put this in front of more people than any tournament before it. Yamal’s sujood after his goal became one of the most replayed images of the group stage, introducing the gesture to millions of viewers who had likely never seen it before. Mohamed Salah, who has performed it after nearly every goal he has scored for club and country for close to a decade, did it again during Egypt’s run. When Egypt beat New Zealand 3-1 to secure their spot in the knockout stage, the entire team dropped into sujud together at the final whistle. Sweden’s Yasin Ayari performed it after scoring against Tunisia. Djed Spence became the first Muslim player to start a match for England, playing under the same global attention.
This did not start in 2026. Salah has done it consistently since his early seasons at Liverpool. Moroccan players were photographed doing it throughout their historic run to the semifinals at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. It has appeared often enough, for long enough, that it has stopped being a surprise to football commentators and started being background noise they haven’t found the right words for. That gap between visibility and understanding is where “kissing the grass” comes from. It is not malicious. It is just a placeholder for something the person describing it never had explained to them.
When the gap becomes a problem
Sometimes the mislabeling is harmless, a lazy phrase repeated by a broadcaster filling airtime. Sometimes it costs a player something real. In 2014, NFL player Husain Abdullah was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct after performing sujud in the end zone following an interception return for a touchdown. The league later admitted the penalty was a mistake and apologized, but the flag had already been thrown, live, in front of a stadium and a television audience who watched an act of worship get treated as a taunt.
That is the actual stake behind getting this right. Not just accuracy for its own sake, but the difference between a stadium full of people recognizing gratitude and a stadium full of people mistaking it for provocation.
The gesture that crossed the line back
The direction this has traveled is not only one way. Cristiano Ronaldo, a practicing Catholic, performed sujud after scoring for Al-Nassr in Saudi Arabia in 2023, a small but pointed gesture of respect toward the crowd and teammates around him. Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Oleksandr Usyk, also not Muslim, has incorporated the position into his own training. Neither man converted anything. Both recognized a physical vocabulary for humility that didn’t need translation to be understood.
That recognition is worth pausing on. A posture built entirely around returning credit to God has become legible, even to people outside the faith, as exactly that. Nobody watching Ronaldo or Usyk assumed they were kissing anything. They understood, correctly, that a person was choosing to make themselves small in a moment built for the opposite.
Why the correction matters more than the trivia
None of this is really about grass. It’s about who a moment of glory gets assigned to. A goal at a World Cup is the kind of moment modern sport is built to sell back to a player as entirely his own: his skill, his instinct, his name on the shirt selling out within the hour. Sujud is a player physically interrupting that story, mid-celebration, to point somewhere else.
Calling it a kiss flattens that into an aesthetic detail, a quirky thing some players do. Calling it what it is, gratitude, offered in the same posture used to offer it in prayer five times a day, restores the actual claim being made: this was never fully mine to keep.
The next time you see it
The next time a player drops to the turf after a goal, notice what commentary does with it. If the word “kiss” shows up, that’s worth naming, gently, for what it is: a placeholder for an explanation nobody’s given yet. The gesture itself has already said everything it needed to. It just deserves a caption that’s actually true.
If this cleared something up for you, share it with whoever’s watched a hundred of these and never known what they were looking at.
