How do we spot diving? Why do players do it?

Diving. Or simulation to use its FIFA approved name. Ask any player, manager or fan in the country and no doubt they’d tell you that they hate it, that conning a referee is never acceptable and that they don’t want to see their club benefit from flagrant cheating. Yet watch any match, from grassroots pub football to the World Cup, Premier League, La Liga, and you will see players accuse each other of feigning contact, referees booking players who they feel have dived and supporters getting angry that the opposition are cheating scumbags who should be in a swimming pool rather than on a football pitch.

But can we really tell when a player has dived?

One scientific study, published recently in the Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, aimed to tackle exactly this question. Researchers Paul H. Morris and David Lewis conducted three experiments into “the perceptions of deceptive intentions in association football (soccer)”, perceptions of diving, basically.

The first experiment investigated the reliability of spotting a dive; is the same clip deemed a dive by everyone who witnesses it? The answer to this question it seemed was yes, there was widespread agreement in classifying a player’s actions as deceptive or not. However, this reliability does not equate to validity. Just because a large number of people deem a player to have dived it does not mean they necessarily have.

The researchers acknowledged this, and so next looked at how valid these accusations of diving were. Players were asked to ‘deceptively exaggerate’ the effect of tackles and then videos of these tackles were shown to participants. It turned out that the relationship between the tackled player’s intentions (whether they were diving) and the judge’s perceptions was a powerful and consistent one; if players intentionally exaggerated the effect of tackles then people watching could tell. This is a good indicator that most football fans are actually pretty good at spotting dives.

Of course, the people judging these dives had no allegiances to the players in the videos. Had people been asked to judge tackles involving players and teams they were familiar with, the results are likely to have been different, but that’s an issue for a different day. Another interesting thing to note with this experiment was the effect of football knowledge on ability to correctly perceive diving. The researchers tracked the judges’ football knowledge, finding there was in fact no difference between those who were highly knowledgeable about the game and those who couldn’t care less about football. This result suggests the age old arguments about having to have played the game at the top level to truly understand it are, as many fans and journalists would argue, nonsense.

The final part of this study, and arguably the most useful if we are to tackle the divers (not literally), was concerned with developing a checklist of behaviours associated with diving. Clips of twenty genuine fouls and twenty blatant dives (as agreed upon by the researchers) were analysed to see which behaviours and acts were either present or absent. Four categories were identified: ‘temporal contiguity’, ‘ballistic continuity’, ‘contact consistency’ and the less technically-named ‘archer’s bow’.

Temporal contiguity simply refers to a time lag between contact and effect, players being tackled and then taking another stride or two (or more in the following clip) before falling over.



Ballistic continuity describes how players exaggerate the momentum of a challenge, tacking additional rolls whilst on the ground in an effort to make it look like there was more contact than there actually was.



Contact consistency is a bit more obvious, there is no relationship between the part of the body where contact is made and the area of injury as indicated by the player. A classic example is Rivaldo having the ball kicked at his knee and clutching his face, but as the paper is concerned more with diving when tackled this clip is probably more apt.



Archer’s bow is the term for the limb, torso and head movements that are associated with diving, typically characterised as head tilted back, chest pumped out, arms flailing into the air and legs bent at the knees. We all know it.



What’s more, when we see it we probably all ask the same questions. How can any contact cause that sort of reaction? Why are his hands in the air? Why does he look like he’s been shot? Momentum, many people will say. When you are felled at speed you will fly through the air. Fair enough, but why would you fly through the air in this manner? In genuine fouls, where players really are grounded unfairly the archer’s bow is rarely present. In this study, elements of this ‘diving checklist’ were spotted only once in an actual foul.

So why do players do it then? If, as the results here suggest, we are actually quite good at spotting diving, and if this ‘archer’s bow’ is rarely evident in genuine fouls, why do we still see it?

The answer to this probably lies in the quotes here from Robin van Persie, “Yes, I did (exaggerate a tackle). Sometimes when you are in the middle of an action and you get a little push…then you are in the right to show in a way to the ref that you are pushed… You sometimes have a little movement with your arms or with your body, but I don’t think that’s really cheating.”

Players want to ensure referees can see the tackle. In trying to earn a foul, players need to make out that a tackle has had a greater effect on their movement than it truly has, but at the same time conceal that this extra effect is actually manufactured by the diver themselves.

So is this really diving? Is it ok to exaggerate the effect of a challenge, as long as the challenge is an illegal one?

It is difficult to answer these questions but I would argue yes, it is diving, and no, it’s not acceptable. Whether a player has been fouled or not, by exaggerating impact they are actively deceiving the referee and altering perceptions about the actions of the player attempting to tackle them. If a defender illegally shoulder barges an attacker, who then goes down to the ground clutching his face, we are being led to believe by the attacker, that the intentions of the defender were much more unlawful than they really were. How can referees be expected to deal out fair punishments for challenges if players are exaggerating the effects of them, altering our beliefs about what the tackler intended? Players earn reputations as divers; referees are forced to hand out bookings or award penalties on the basis of deceptive behavior and the integrity of the game as a whole takes an almighty beating.

This study certainly offers something to think about.

If the consensus amongst observers is that a player dived then he probably did. If a neutral observer views a clip in isolation and deems it a dive then it probably is. If a player goes down like he’s had a taser shoved up his backside then it’s safe to say, he probably has dived.

But then, is this really anything new? Maybe not, but at least it offers some sort of evidence that diving can be spotted, and offers some sort of hope that with the right measures we could actually do something about the levels of simulation in the game.

References
Morris, P. H. & Lewis, D. (2010). Tackling diving: the perception of deceptive intentions in association football (soccer). Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 34, 1-13.