The first three pre-World War II World Cups, won by Uruguay and Italy (twice) were, by all accounts, brutal affairs. Players played on with serious injuries and referees afforded them precious little protection.
The biographies of players from past eras suggest concealing pain and injury was not only seen as more manly, but a tactical necessity. Players never wanted their opponents to suspect they were hurt or, worse, easily intimidated.
Things began to change when ruling bodies decided to improve football's image by cracking down on thuggery. Anxiety about serious injuries seems to have risen in the 1970s and intensified in the 1980s.
The result was that the threshold for what was considered a foul plummeted. By the beginning of the 2000s, it was almost impossible for players in top leagues to engage in what would once have been considered a legitimate scrap for the ball.
Possession still changes regularly, but this is usually caused by an errant pass or miscontrolled ball. This is the heart of the matter. Because it is now more than ever a possession game, being robbed of the ball by an opponent is one of the worst mistakes a player can make. Because it is more rare, it is all the more embarrassing when it happens.
In this situation, the histrionic behaviour of players begins to look more rational. By screaming and hurling themselves to the ground, players force referees to make a decision where one would previously not have been needed. And because of the low tolerance for rough play, the behaviour is usually rewarded with a free kick, no matter how slight the body contact.
Occasionally, though, referees decide not to award a free kick, at which point the "injured" player has a decision to make. Sometimes the recovery is miraculously instantaneous because the player senses that his team actually needs him in the ensuing play. Annoyingly often, though, the player decides that to discontinue the charade would amount to a confession of guilt and the performance goes on.
Again, because of the safety-conscious mindset that prevails, this normally means the game is stopped while the "injured" player is treated - and often stretchered off the field before roaring back on to rejoin the fray.
The spread of this practice is bad for many reasons, not least of which is the extra unnecessary pressure it places on referees to make on-the-spot judgements about whether a player is really hurt. It has also radically increased the incentives for players to waste time and feign serious injury in order to have an opponent sent off.
As a result, sending-offs in which the offending player has scarcely touched his opponent are depressingly commonplace.
Most of all, feigning injury is an attempt to nullify the advantage an opponent gains from winning a contest for the ball.
So by reducing the tolerance for foul play, the game's lawmakers have created a weirdly puritanical and hypocritical on-field culture in which exposing the misdeeds of others matters much more than one's own ethical conduct.
What the melodrama of football players tells us is that banning one kind of behaviour almost always creates another. An important loss has been the ability of referees to punish diving or "simulation". Because feigning injury is now so rampant, football's laws against it are surely the most regularly broken and yet under-enforced in all of sport.
The only solutions are the use of video to punish retrospectively players who feign injury and the acceptance of the unfashionable ideas that not only can conflict and contestation be healthy, but that sometimes in life people are hurt and it is nobody's fault.
Michael Gard is a senior research fellow at Southern Cross University in Australia.
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