BrianGarst.com

While the follow video demonstrates a rather blatant example of the behavior, this kind of gaming is not unusual in the sport:

The player in question grabs the hand of an opponent and forces it to hit him in the face. Why would any sane person do this?

The answer is simple: the game gives him incentive to do so. If he successfully tricks the central authority, his opponent is penalized. If he does not, he loses nothing in the context of the game. Thus why soccer is notorious for this kind of fake injuries. Rather than beat their opponents through skill, players have learned that it can be more cost effective to trick referrees into thinking they have been hurt by their opponents.

In an old post giving my thoughts on why soccer has not caught on in the US to the degree it has elsewhere in the world, I noted:

Obviously it’s necessary to have a punishment for certain behaviors. Punching another player in the face, for instance, shouldn’t be allowed. But what happens when such well-intended rules are applied too liberally? The result, to the disgust of many Americans, is the creation of a soccer victim class. These players fall at the drop of a hat and feign injury, all with the hopes of taking advantage of the central regulating authority.

In the real world this might be considered a form of rent-seeking. It is an example of the unintended consequences that can result from well meaning meddling by centralized authorities. The rules of soccer, by failing to provide any sort of punishment for trying to trick the referee (imagine what would happen in the real world if filing a false criminal report was not itself a punishable offense), have given players an incentive to spend less time playing the game, and more time playing the referees. I doubt it was the intention of the rule-makers that this be the result.

The lesson here is that incentives matter and that any interference, by manipulating incentives, can drastically change the environment in which we all live.  This does not mean that rules, or laws, should never be adopted. Rather, it suggests a need for caution when considering new forms of interference in free activities. When even the simplest of rules – don’t hit your opponent in the face – can create unintended consequences, it demands a naturally skeptical stance toward large, complex, or knee-jerk pieces of legislation, which encompasses a vast majority of the bills being produced in Washington DC these days.

economics rent-seeking soccer