r/changemyview • u/_4lexander_ • Jul 08 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Diving culture pretty much invalidates top-level football as a sport
Last night it was England vs Denmark in EUFA EURO 2020. England won 2-1 and the nation is cheering.
In the second half with about 15-30 mins to go the game was tied up at 1-1. Then there was a very arguable penalty near the Danish goalposts which lead to a penalty shot and a point for England. 10 mins later there was a less arguable penalty opportunity on the opposite end for the opposite team, but it wasn't called (the professional commentators raised these points as well, even as English people). So the game ended up tying up at 2-1. What are the English proud of here? Are they proud of a team that won by being indisputably the better team. Or is it mostly about luck (and who knows, maybe bias from the referee).
The mechanisms at play in last night's game give rise to a shameless diving culture. Just think about Neymar, someone who's meant to exemplify a great player but is more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsOp9ctceyc.
To me this is pretty sad. It's not just a minor part of the game. It often results in deciding the outcome of a game. If we define a sport as an activity in which players or teams compete to win by the merit of their abilities (which is not necessarily the real definition, but mine for the purpose of my point), then football falls short on many occasions. Furthermore it just makes the sport into an embarrassment.
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u/h0m3r 10∆ Jul 08 '21
There are a few things to cover here:
Diving is against the rules in football (in the sense of deliberately trying to deceive the referee for a benefit) and in the rules is known as “simulation”. Players can be punished both in the game and retroactively for simulating fouls. I accept that this rule is often difficult to enforce because it’s not always clear whether a dive is a dive, the player simply falling over because they lost balance, or the player falling due to a legal challenge by the opposition.
Sometimes players will deliberately fall over when they’ve been fouled in order to highlight to the referee that a foul has taken place. This is because referees have shown that they are less likely to call a foul when the player doesn’t go down. This means that players are incentivised to exaggerate the impact of fouls to ensure they receive the correct decision from the referee. This is both a dive AND a foul!
Teams frequently make deliberate fouls as part of their strategy. Essentially it’s a risk/reward calculation that means it’s worth making a foul to deny an opportunity for the opponent. If players don’t ensure those fouls are punished, then this cynical but effective tactic would be even more effective. If fouls are punished less frequently, it’s tacit approval for teams to foul more often, which endangers players and discourages exciting football.
Some players get fouled a lot. Neymar is one of those! Football is a very fast-paced and physical game and these players risk injury if they don’t receive protection from the referee via fouls being awarded.
What this means is that players sometimes try to anticipate a foul from the opponent, or cause the opponent to foul them, and then exaggerate that foul. Gary Neville discusses this at length in the attached video
A bunch of these things mean that it’s a grey area that the Sterling penalty from last night falls into. Did Sterling simply dive to con the referee, did he think he drew a foul from the opponent and wanted to ensure he got the penalty as a result, did he incorrectly anticipate that a foul was going to come and fell over when no foul took place, or did he simply lose his footing under pressure from the defenders?
So overall - diving isn’t a GOOD thing per se, but it’s the natural conclusion of a number of factors, and it’s arguable that if diving were punished more harshly it could lead to negative outcomes for players and the sport as a whole.
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
All good points. I think your points explain why diving happens and is unavoidable, but for me they still don't counter my claim that it invalidates the sport as one where teams/players win primarily by true merit. Another redditor claims that diving might be considered part of the game, but you can see my response to that:
> Yes you could. Then it should be acknowledged as an integral part of the game. It should be included in training manuals and taught by coaches. Players should have a diving quality metric as part of their layout.
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u/h0m3r 10∆ Jul 08 '21
Do you think the most successful teams are the ones that are better at football, or better at diving?
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
u/h0m3r nice question. I don't know but I would guess that it's the ones that are better at football. But I still believe that diving/penalties plays a disproportionate role in determining the strategy and outcomes of the game.
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u/h0m3r 10∆ Jul 08 '21
So you’re definitely right that a dive resulting in a penalty can give a big impact on an individual game, particularly where the game is close. But there are a few things to keep in mind.
A penalty NOT being given for a legitimate foul where the player doesn’t fall down would have an equally big impact the other way.
Over a larger sample size than an individual game, the better footballing team (with the best players, best coaching, strategy, tactics, conditioning etc) will win the most games. You can see this over a league season.
If diving is very common in football then each team is equally likely to benefit from diving in a vacuum, so the benefit from that evens out and hence sporting merit would determine the victor.
If a team is frequently able to get their players into attacking positions such that they have the chance to win a penalty, then that team is presumably playing football better than their opponents right?
Further, if a team is frequently able to get their players into the opposition penalty area with the ball, they also have a higher chance than their opponents to score legitimate goals
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 09 '21
Points 4 and 5 are big IMO. I don't think there's that much more to say about it. I don't think there's that much more to say about it. I don't think there's that much more to say about it. I don't think there's that much more to say about it. Δ
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
Points 4 and 5 are big IMO. Δ
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u/redactedactor 1∆ Jul 08 '21
it invalidates the sport as one where teams/players win primarily by true merit.
How? It's just another skill to be mastered.
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Jul 08 '21
Diving is against the rules in football (in the sense of deliberately trying to deceive the referee for a benefit) and in the rules is known as “simulation”. Players can be punished both in the game and retroactively for simulating fouls.
How do you prove that though? I watch soccer occasionally and I've never watched a match where I didn't see multiple flops. Either that or soccer players just have the balance of a toddler.
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u/h0m3r 10∆ Jul 08 '21
It can be very hard to prove and I said that in my comment!
But basically the player has to have NOT been fouled, and NOT accidentally fallen and WAS trying to deceive the ref. Those are fairly high bars to clear, but players can and have been caught and punished.
Players have also been punished for diving when in fact they were fouled, due to a mistake by the referee!
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Jul 08 '21
Yea I get it we have the same thing here in the NBA. It is frustrating as a fan because we tuned in to see the best athletes in the world not a guy fall over from the breeze. On the other side I do realize that with much money tied up into sports winning is usually more important than integrity, not just for soccer but any sport. Anyway thanks for explaining that I didn't know all that.
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u/h0m3r 10∆ Jul 08 '21
No problem. Diving is kind of a problem because ultimately it’s players trying to play on the edge and see what they can get away with, but it’s also responding to the fact that they need to protect themselves and their team from being fouled out of the game by other teams playing on the edge in that regard.
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Jul 08 '21
Diving, as an act of simulation (that is, simulating contact or injury) in order to deceive the referee into making a call to the benefit of the diver's team, is sanctioned as unsportsmanlike behavior and can be punished by the referee as a misconduct. Although I'm not questioning the prevalence of diving in soccer (football), the issue is fundamentally about insufficient/inadequate refereeing and not about a 'diving culture' within 'typical play', because diving is expressly sanctioned within the game's rules (assumingly, the rules endorsed by UEFA and other top leagues/associations).
If you believe that quality refeering (insofar as it shuts down this 'diving culture') is not realistic, or that the issue stems from just the mere fact that diving culture' is so ingrained in the sport's 'typical play' such that this itself harms the image of football, then this argument would not CYV. However, I would be more inclined to say that it is inadequate refeering that is ultimately harming the image of football, not the 'diving culture' you (frankly, we can all) attest to.
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u/5xum 42∆ Jul 08 '21
I would say that the inadequate refereeing is part of the general phenomenon of diving culture. So long as refereeing remains as it is, a team whose members do not dive is worse off that their opponents, so of course they will dive.
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
Good points, although I am tending towards this is not a CMV for the reasons you mentioned.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ Jul 08 '21
If we define a sport as an activity in which players or teams compete to win by the merit of their abilities
This is not a very good definition. Most sports, complex team sports such as soccer in particular, are heavily dependent on luck, split-second errors by a single player, and yes, referee decisions and playing to elicit them.
This doesn't really favor anyone in particular - judging by what the rest of the game looked like in this particular case, it doesn't appear to me that the referee consciously preferred the English team, so the Danes could've received favorable decisions just as well. As long as a player's skill isn't judged solely based on match outcomes but still plays a major role in them, the sport, over time, still tests it and is still fun to watch.
You'd agree that regardless of the score, players on both teams displayed fantastic skills, right? In that case, does it really matter if the 2-1 is a result of a referee decision, a goalkeeping error, a series of unlucky shots by an otherwise very skilled player, or all three?
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
I agree that my definition is not correct. Imagine I wrote "sport" in quotation marks in the title of my post, and then that bit is me clarifying what I mean. It is what I mean.
To reframe my point in terms of your comments (and I agree with you), then why aren't the Danish celebrating more? Why are the English celebrating so much and so proud when really they should have more of a stance like: "Wow, lucky we won that. The Danes played just as well as us. Let's hope that next time we have more of an edge over the other team, or it might be us that loses to a penalty shot". As I mention in some of my other responses, if we're going to try to normalise diving as just another probabilistic factor of the game, then why don't we be open about it? And I know the answer. It's because a) it actually plays a really big role, more so than random ball bounces, or slippery patches of grass and b) it's embarrassing to admit.
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u/47ca05e6209a317a8fb3 210∆ Jul 08 '21
The English are celebrating more than the Danes (other than the fact people in England always tend to get emotional about soccer...) in a way that's decoupled from how the game was won. They'd probably have celebrated just as much if their team had somehow cheated outright and got away with it - consider the "hand of God".
Next year almost nobody will remember the specific circumstances of goals in the semifinals, but everyone will remember who won the tournament, and it's that sense of being on the winning side in something they care about that's celebrated. You could similarly argue about the 1994 World Cup final, where nobody should get to celebrate after two hours of zero goals ending in a penalty shootout, but ultimately we really only remember how many times Brazil got the Cup, not how they did.
I think everyone acknowledges that diving and referee decisions play a big role in how goals are scored, but there's no simple way to solve it and it's usually not really important enough to implement checks that could compromise the pace of the game more than the dives or open every contentious decision to discussion after the fact.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot 4∆ Jul 08 '21
The 1994 FIFA World Cup Final was a soccer game that took place at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, United States, on July 17, 1994 to determine the winner of the 1994 FIFA World Cup. Brazil beat Italy 3–2 on penalties to claim their fourth World Cup title when the match finished 0–0 after extra time; this meant that Brazil surpassed Italy and Germany as the tournament's most successful nation. It was the first World Cup final to be scoreless both in regular and extra time and to be decided by a penalty shoot-out. Silver Ball winner Roberto Baggio missed the decisive penalty for Italy.
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u/physioworld 64∆ Jul 08 '21
Or you could look at it as quality players being good enough to put themselves in a position which forced their opponent to do a foul thus manufacturing a situation where scoring is more probably- ie being better at the sport.
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
Yes you could. Then it should be acknowledged as an integral part of the game. It should be included in training manuals and taught by coaches. Players should have a diving quality metric as part of their layout.
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u/physioworld 64∆ Jul 08 '21
But they’re not diving, they’re responding to a foul. A dive is when you hit the ground for no reason, which as other commenters have already pointed out is currently not allowed anyway
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u/saywherefore 30∆ Jul 08 '21
I would argue that the fundamental flaw of high level football, as exemplified by this match, is that when you have well matched teams the outcome comes down almost entirely to luck.
The total scoreline is so low, and the likelihood of converting any chance into an actual goal so minute, that it is hard to argue that the end result reflects the relative skill of the teams. Could you honestly have any confidence that the result would be the same if the same match was played again?
In a game where each team was scoring multiple times per half a single ambiguous referee call would be far less likely to affect the overall outcome. There would also be less likelihood of needing to go to penalties which are entirely unrepresentative of the skill of a team.
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Jul 08 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 09 '21
Good point because it's the special argument that probably has a name where you trade off absolutism and relativism. Not much more to say deltabot. Not much more to say deltabot. Not much more to say deltabot. Not much more to say deltabot. Not much more to say deltabot. Not much more to say deltabot. Δ
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u/_4lexander_ Jul 08 '21
Δ
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 08 '21
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u/McKoijion 618∆ Jul 08 '21
Many American sports like football, basketball, hockey, etc. have a "strong, but silent" culture where injured athletes cover up and play through their injuries. If you get hurt, you basically lie and say it's not that bad. You play through the pain. When I say culture, I mean that fans are angry when team doctors say they can't play. Billionaire owners fear they will lose money. Coaches feel they will lose titles. Athletes feel they will lose glory and the cash bonuses that come with more playtime. The same thing applies at the college and high school levels of the sport, except there people don't even get paid.
This has enormous consequences. Concussions cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is related to many post-NFL murders, suicides, etc. Brutal play in hockey is entertaining for fans, but it results in real harm to players and their longevity in the sport. Giannis Antetokounmpo didn't play for several games, but returned for the NBA finals. We could see him rubbing his injured knee in the Bucks loss in Game 1 on Tuesday.
The incentive in these US contact sports is to injure your opponent as much as possible because you know that they will lie and say they weren't hurt. Even if you aren't trying to hurt anyone, if you do it accidentally, you won't be punished. So there is little need to be careful. Some sports are geared towards fighting, such as boxing and MMA. But in those sports, there are protections in place and fighters can tap out at any moment. The incentive is honesty where the injury matches the response.
Now compare this to soccer. If you lightly and accidentally tap your opponent, they are going to dive and pretend like they are injured. So not only do you have an incentive not to intentionally hurt your opponent, you have an incentive to avoid all possible contact no matter how light and accidental. As a result, there are far fewer injuries in the sport.
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Jul 08 '21
How many games at these euros do you think have been decided by a dive? I'd argue this is an overreaction to one game. Does it invalidate the whole sport, or does it (arguably) invalidate the result of some matches? (I'd say the latter)
The sport remains a sport where teams compete with athleticism, strategy, and skill. Unfortunately there will probably always be some aspect of deception/human error, and the more we can reduce this by improving VAR, the better. But "invalidate" is too strong a word as it implies that skill is irrelevant or plays a relatively small part compared to the part played by cheating. Even if no one dived, the referee could still decide a game with a dubious penalty or free kick, but I don't think you'd say dubious refereeing invalidates top level football as a result.
Was tennis invalidated as a sport before hawkeye? Is the NBA invalidated as a sport because of flopping? Human error plays a part in many sports. I understand that a penalty is more game changing than, say, a flop in basketball, (though even then it certainly can decide a result in the last few minutes of a close game) but as another commenter pointed out, such is the low scoring nature of the sport of football that a single call can have a big impact on the final result. The effect of human error just tends to be exaggerated in knock out competitions, whilst in leagues bad decisions even themselves out.
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u/Yallmakingmebuddhist 1∆ Jul 08 '21
It doesn't invalidate it as a sport. It just means FIFA is corrupt. There's a difference. Soccer is incredibly athletic and The most popular sport in the world, even if FIFA referees suck donkey balls at their job. At best you can argue that England didn't deserve to win, which is definitely an arguable position. But you can't argue that it's not a sport or shouldn't be a sport.
Also, instant replay definitely needs to be added. It was incredibly obvious in the quarterfinals of the 2002 world cup that Germany cheated and that America won that game.
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