Trending in the world of #WorldCup2014 more than almost any other topic is the moral condemnation of players feigning injury in order to deceive the referee thus garnering a free kick, aka, “flopping.” Americans seem disgusted by it. Even our own team appears to stand against it. In a recent New York Times article addressing this issue entitled, “Where Dishonesty Is Best Policy, U.S. Soccer Falls Short,” U.S. assistant coach Tab Ramos comments, “ [Flopping] is something we don’t do the way other teams do.” And he continues, touching on the ethical nature of it all, “It’s clear that the American nature is to try and make everything fair, to try and be fair to the game.” I, too, argue previously regarding the nefarious nature of flopping.
As I got to thinking about the popularity of this practice, I wondered if we might be missing something. This same article refers to flopping as a “skill,” albeit one that U.S. players don’t do well, if they do it at all. And yet later the author writes, “Gamesmanship and embellishment—or, depending on your sensibilities, cheating—are part of high-level soccer.” But this same action can’t be “gamesmanship” for some and “cheating” for others.
I thought it useful to first employ an analogy with a practice in a sport we all grasp intellectually as well as culturally. Fortunately, we have America’s pastime, baseball, to help. And within that pastime, we have the widely accepted practice analogous to flopping: framing.
For those unfamiliar, good catchers commonly catch a pitch just outside the strike zone and then subtly tweak their glove to give the illusion that the pitch crossed the plate within the strike zone. To put it in flopping-terms, the catcher play-acts in order to manipulate the umpire to give his team a favorable call that they otherwise didn’t deserve.
Baseball aficionados will love this recent ESPN Magazine article as it’s chock full of statistics, graphs, and graphics all of which demonstrate how much a good-framing catcher matters. Through a series of probability models, they explain how the best catchers—i.e. the best framers—prevent up to 50 runs scored by opponents over the course of a season: more than any other player on the team.
And yet…there is rarely, if ever, talk about the rampant cheating of catchers in baseball. Not only is framing allowed, it is taught as a skill to catchers at all levels. It’s entrenched in the culture—the ethos—of baseball.
As I’ve argued elsewhere—and as we all know—the “everyone does it” argument regarding a particular practice does not justify the practice. This sort of relativism quickly reveals itself as morally vacuous by turning our lens toward the time in recent history when slavery was common and allowed. We don’t say, “Well slavery was ethical at one time and now it’s not,” but, instead, “Slavery was unethical then and still is today.” In order to allow framing, we are forced into determining if something about the culture of sport allows this type of argument to maintain some semblance of validity.
One difference between sport and the non-sporting realm of ethics lies in the fact that sport is, by definition, socially constructed. Sport in its very nature involves socially contrived objectives—such as running around the bases or kicking a ball into a rectangle—which must be achieved while accounting for socially contrived obstacles—such as invoking a strike zone or prohibiting the use of one’s hands. And so, we have a possible argument on behalf of framing pitches: within the culture and context of baseball, this is just what we do. Were someone to come into this community from the outside—some sports ethicist, for example—and say, “You really ought to refrain from framing pitches: it’s unethical,” he would miss the point of what goes on inside this particular culture. It would be like a passer-by poking his head over the white-picket fence of a front yard wiffle ball game and admonishing the particular family for throwing the ball at runners because of ethical concerns. The family of wiffle ball players might rightly respond, “Who are you to judge the ethics of our made-up game?”
This argument, based on the ethos of respective sports, may help with many similar discussions. One famous argument within the philosophy of sport concludes that the intentional fouls so common at the end of basketball games are unethical as any attempt to foul intentionally results in that player ceasing to even play the game. But, if we invoke this ethos-based position, we see that this is just how it’s done within the basketball playing community.
If we accept this foundation for examining actions in sport, then a few additional issues arise which require consideration. First, we have the potential for conflicting cultures and, thus, conflicting approaches to sport. For example, if it really is within the American ethos not to flop then the U.S. Soccer Team truly is at a disadvantage: in the same game, the U.S. refrains from employing a tactic their competitor pursues and thus surrenders an advantage to their competitor.
This exact issue played out in a previous World Cup for the women. The 1999 Championship match came down to penalty kicks. Immediately prior to the shooter kicking the ball, U.S. goalie Briana Scurry cleverly took two steps forward in order to block the penalty kick. This illegal save turned out to be the difference giving the U.S. the victory and the World Cup title. The goalie for the opposing Chinese team held true to the letter of the rule—remain on the goal line until the ball is struck—forgoing the advantage garnered by Scurry’s approach, and failed to block a single shot.
In an interview, Scurry offered her version of the ethos-based account, “Everybody does it.”1 Another professional soccer goalie shared her view, commenting in the same New York Times article, “People are saying, ‘Wow, Briana Scurry cheated.’ But they don’t understand that part of the game. What Briana did was perfectly normal…I don’t call that cheating.” Each team having their own ethos led to two different sets of morality within the same contest, one providing an advantage the other didn’t have.
Another concern with the pro-flopping ethos hinges on defending players being punished for a foul they didn’t commit. This hardly seems like a recipe for a fair contest. The only justification possible here being that an opposing player may be capitalizing on poor defensive position. In the first game of this World Cup, the flopping controversy kicked off with Brazil’s Fred flopping in the penalty box to “earn”—i.e., be gifted—a penalty kick which gave Brazil the go-ahead goal of a game they eventually won. While he clearly flopped, he did earn good position within the penalty box rendering his defender in poor position as he’d placed his hand on Fred’s shoulder. One might argue that Fred simply capitalized on the poor defensive positioning of the Croatian player.2
But there is an important reason flopping differs from pitch-framing in that flopping taps in to an innate human concern for the welfare of others. Even infants cry when they hear another infant crying. Referred to as “sympathy crying,” it demonstrates our human instinct to feel concern when others are injured or display signs of pain and distress. While flopping taps into this, pitch-framing does nothing of the sort. A culture of floppers encourages apathy in the face of human suffering.
But lastly, where the pro-flopping proponent really gets tripped up: it’s against the rules. The “Laws of the Game” forbid it. The governing body, FIFA, declares under Law 12: a player must be cautioned for “unsporting behaviour” if that player, “attempts to deceive the referee by feigning injury or pretending to have been fouled.”
I realize I could have begun this article with this little gem. A nice, concise 3-sentence blog entry for the week. When a player intentionally breaks a rule intending to avoid detection in order to gain an advantage, that player has cheated. It’s one of the rare statements on which nearly all who understand sport and logic agree. But the conversation of an ethos-based moral framework within the construct of sport is important to have. And it leaves us with both a clear understanding of the ethical status of flopping (and framing) and a greater understanding of the richness and complexity of sport in general. No foul there.
1Not quite everybody does it, as her competitor in that very competition refrained from doing it. Her quote regarding this particular situation nicely illustrates a major weakness of the ethos-based argument.
2It’s worth considering the distinction between a player completely feigning versus embellishing something that actually happened. For example, a player might actually be kicked in the shin illegally and embellish the kick in order to focus the referee’s attention on the incident.
