Referee Noumandiez Doue signals to the bench after Ecuador’s Enner Valencia is injured during the Group E World Cup match June 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
And this just in from the Annals of Improbable-Though-Highly-Amusing Research….
The Wall Street Journal has set out to quantify and rank a particular phenomenon that is essential to professional football and that arguably drives Americans up a wall more than any other aspect: “the amount of time players spend embellishing injuries.”
The Journal goes on to report:
Fans of the world’s most popular game know that this is just one of soccer’s oldest and most universally despised tactics. Turning a small foul into a death performance worthy of La Scala can draw cards for opposing players, kill time from the clock or just give one’s winded teammates a breather. What’s interesting about the World Cup is that not all national teams are the same. Some embellish all the time, some hardly at all.
The Journal researchers went on to catalog players’ performance in the World Cup and come up with what they call the “Flopping Ranking.”
Check out the table below or read more here.
