For many Americans, the World Cup is a little like a family Thanksgiving: a feast of reënacted arguments that lie dormant the rest of the year.
Nothing seems to annoy international fans of the futebol more than Americans’ objections to the players’ widespread practice of diving, flopping, and/or rolling around on the grass in feigned agony, as though sledgehammered in the shin rather than hardly nicked. When you call attention to the phenomenon—what FIFA, the sport’s governing body, euphemistically calls “simulation”—you may be accused of trafficking in American exceptionalism or an outdated idea of masculinity. Early in the World Cup, which runs for the next three weeks, the Times had a page-one story about how the United States players and coaches were concerned that they weren’t adept or eager enough at faking injury to get a square deal from the referees. Americans, the piece said, are raised to play fair.
“Bogus article,” the novelist and football fan Teju Cole tweeted. “Same tedious shit every World Cup. . . . Americans are more honest than greasy foreigners.” Sam Borden, the reporter who’d written the story, asked Cole for some clarification, and Cole responded, “Like the politician who says his only weakness is that he’s a workaholic, the piece was disingenuously braggy about the USA.”
When you love something, you make allowances. Many hockey fans, enthralled by toughness (hockey players don’t even acknowledge real injuries, much less dramatize fake ones), contort themselves to justify bare-knuckled fistfights. Baseball fans, sensitive about the glacial pace of their game, wax on about the majesty of a sport without a clock. And so, when the subject of diving comes up, many soccer fans rationalize it. They cite the universality of gamesmanship and the prevalence of floppers in other sports (Exhibit A: Dwyane Wade, in the N.B.A. finals, earlier this month), or else they find a way to enjoy the fakery (zesty subplots!) and see it as necessary (the refs would not see the fouls if the players didn’t oversell them).
Still, it can be galling to watch grown men pretend to be hurt. It’s one thing to embellish a penalty, and another to act as though you are in pain when you are not. Maybe there are places where toughness is not a virtue and lying is not a vice, but, wherever you are, being a wuss is being a wuss. In an early match between Germany and Portugal, the hand of Pepe, a Portuguese defender, brushed the face of an opponent, Thomas Müller, and Müller went down as though he had been stabbed in the jaw. Pepe, himself an infamous flopper, ran back to Müller and began to scold him. Müller, perceiving a head butt, sprang to his feet, miraculously healed. Pepe, who had done little more than call out a crybaby, got a red card (meaning he was ejected from that game and the next), and the commentators deplored his loss of composure. Müller, meanwhile, got no foul and ended the game with three goals: a hero. Ugh.
A few years ago, Daryl Rosenbaum, a doctor and an associate professor of medicine at Wake Forest, and a soccer enthusiast taken aback by the prevalence of embellishment, conducted a study of injury simulation in men’s international soccer. He examined the women’s game the following year and found that there were twice as many apparent injuries among the men and that twice as many of the women’s injuries seemed to be real. Maybe this means that men are four times more likely to fake being hurt.
Are men wimps? “There’s more money in men’s soccer, and it’s been around a lot longer,” Rosenbaum said last week. “Multiply more money by more time, and you get more cynical behavior. You have a set of incentives specific to the demonstration of an injury: the red card and the yellow card, which are more ‘valuable’ than most penalties in other sports.” Players now capitalize on those incentives—in this case, by pretending to be hurt.
There’s a word for faking it in pursuit of what doctors call “secondary gain”: malingering. Though its lineage is not entirely ignoble (notable malingerers include King David, Odysseus, and Yossarian), malingering can subject one, in the military, to a court-martial and, in civilian life, to shame among one’s peers. Connivance puts it a step beyond hypochondria. Good sense distinguishes it from Munchausen syndrome. Still, the world is inconsistent in its indulgence of self-pity. French rail workers, acclaimed Norwegian novelists, American whiplash sufferers: the calls often go their way when they roll around on the grass. There’s some irony in the fact that the United States, nation of litigants and spoiled children, is the country with the soccer players who supposedly flop the least. Maybe it’s all a matter of misaligned incentives. As Rosenbaum said, “It’s not often that I’ve had to fill out a disability claim for someone who loves their job.” ♦
