/ Cory Doctorow / 4:44 am Thu Jul 7, 2011

Women football players half as likely to fake an injury as men

According to a study published in Research in Sports Medicine, woman football (soccer) players are about half as likely to fake an injury as male players. The researchers used a representative sample of match-videos, counted injuries, and noted whether the player left the field for a substantial period or had visible blood, and counted those as definite injuries, then ranked the remaining injuries by their plausibility. Hilariously, they use the term "injury simulation," instead of "faking an injury," the former is apparently the term of art preferred by FIFA, which knows an awful lot about fraud.
"While it was difficult to know for certain if a player had a true injury or was faking or embellishing, we found that only 13.7 percent of apparent injuries met our definition for a 'definite' injury," Rosenbaum said. "Also consider that we saw six apparent injuries per match in the 2007 Women's World Cup but team physicians from the tournament reported only 2.3 injuries per match, so it looks like there may be some simulation in the women's game."

Rosenbaum's research indicates that apparent injury incidents for women are much less frequent than for men, however, occurring at a rate of 5.74 per match as compared to 11.26 per men's match. The proportion of apparent injuries that were classified as "definite" was nearly twice as high for women, 13.7 percent, as compared to 7.2 percent for men.

(Image: Ambulance, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from danielmorris's photostream)

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  1. This is unacceptable! Who is ‘science’ to come along and tell us that “you play like a girl” doesn’t mean what Common Sense tells us it means?

  2. @phisrow

    You’re just jealous because men are better at simulating injury than women.

    1. If I were a ghastly ‘evolutionary psychology’ troll/internet deviant this is where I would posit the theory that females possess less advanced injury-feigning skills because their gathering-based paleolithic material culture had very low rates of physical injury and placed an emphasis on advanced social skills, while the rugged hunting males were off evolving tactics suitable for killing prey and/or neighboring tribes…

  3. Whats sad is FIFA could stop this crap if they wanted. Any player injury that results in stoppage of play, that player must leave the field for 10 minutes before returning.

    1. FIFA is one of the most corrupt organisations on the planet, ‘expecting’ them to do anything without a huge bribe is madness.

  5. All said and done, I’ve come off the field with cleat marks up and down my legs. It hurts a good deal when 2 inches of plastic(hopefully) stud are forcefully applied to your shin, and it can take a minute or two to “walk it off”..

    Maybe women are quicker to walk it off.. or maybe they’re just less dirty players?

  6. Anyone watching the women’s World Cup? I think it’d be a lot better if they played on smaller pitches, it’s like watching 14 year old boys.

  7. Thanks for fronting “football” here instead of “soccer.” Very cool!

    fraac, why is men’s (and boy’s) football your standard of measurement there? Women’s soccer is its own thing, and the women’s World Cup is awesome.

  8. I hate injury-faking. The Barcelona FC amateur dramatics society have a lot to answer for. One big potential cause for the men/women discrepancy in play-acting might be that there is substantially more money in men’s football than in women’s.

  9. Given the fact that male players objectively play harder (forces involved) and might arguably have more physically resilient tissue, I’d say that this is both to be expected and “good”. You don’t want players to more seriously injure themselves by underestimating an injury. With greater forces involved and greater resilience, I would want men to take a little more time to make sure they are not really injured, and also expect that more often they would not be really injured.

    I get that this is somewhat speculative and is not meant as a pejorative, but it’s difficult to argue that it isn’t true. It’s been pretty well proven that few women can match the speed and force of men’s play. Even if the men are not actually more resilient, I would expect them to more often need to assess whether they are really injured because of the greater forces involved.

    I don’t think it’s reasonable, realistic, or fair to call assessment of a potential injury ‘fraud’. Although I am sure faking can and does sometimes happen.

  10. I was going to make a comment on this thread but one of the other Anons got within a foot of me so I am in considerable pain right now. Anyone got some magic spray to use on my quite-possibly-broken leg? Oh, the ref isn’t looking? Nevermind.

  11. It might have to do with guys overreacting in the first few seconds of a non-injury (screaming like a child and/or flopping dramatically on the ground), and then, realizing that they’re not injured, continuing to give the impression that they really are in order to cover up the fact that their immediate reaction was incommensurate. I’ve done this and I bet guys do it more than girls. ANSWERED!

  12. Only half?! Wow, I knew girls were bad at sports, but I didn’t think they were that bad!

  13. Anon’s suggestion for incentivizing violent behavior will surely make for better football. Just kick the other team’s players hard enough, and they can’t come back for ten minutes? Genius!

    And FC Barcelona is a team that plays football, keeping the ball 70% of the time against the best opposition in the world. It’s pretty tiresome to see haters blame them for being good, and excusing the opponents who kick them because they can’t beat them within the rules.

  14. I have to agree w/ the other anonymous here. When I was coaching youth league, we had a striker w/ lots of talent but was a f’ing diver. One match, he was rolling on the floor so I benched him. For the next half hour, he kept bugging me to put him back in. I just kept telling him I didn’t want his “injury” to get worse. It was his last dive.
    This is why there is so much interest in this cup. Not only do the women all play attacking football, they don’t simulate like the millionaire men. There are lots of women out there with all the skill of the men who we all know & very few invovled in sex scandals.

  15. If I’m not mistaken, the photograph illustrating this article about football (soccer) is actually from a game of football (hand-egg).

  16. This is news to me, although I did realize that Slytherins were more likely to fake an injury than Gryffindors.

  17. While I agree there’s a problem with ‘simulating’ in soccer (though the NBA is starting to catch up), it’s important to remember that there are almost no substitutions in international level football, and some part of lying on the ground after a foul is just fatigue, rather than excruciating injury. If NBA or NFL players had to stay in the whole game without a break, they’d grab a chance to lie on the ground for a few extra seconds, too.

  18. I have tried to “get into” football several times, and the constant fake injuries really turned me off to watching it. Not that the sport needs more market share, but removing this bit of drama could help win over more fans.

  19. The difference in the amount of money in the men’s game and women’s is waaaaay more than double, the viewing figures are waaaaay more than double. Doesn’t this mean that if those things were equal, women would fake injury far more than men?

  20. I’ve been saying this for a long time, although I’m glad I have some science to back me up now.

    I cannot stand men’s soccer (and I WILL CALL IT THAT). The diving really drives me crazy. It’s the same reason I can’t watch the NBA and the reason I’m starting to get pissed at the NFL. I hate the mentality of “we can’t beat you on merit, so let me try to get a cheap shot here.”

    I love women’s soccer. I don’t know, I think that women have more to prove then men do, so they don’t try to pull these kinds of stunts. They want to be seen as serious competitors and diving would only ruin their credibility. I think men’s soccer can deal with the credibility hit of flopping, because it’s not seen as a niche market, except here in America where flopping really hurts our interest in the sport.

    But this is just my 3 1/2 cents.

    1. In all defense we’ve been calling it football since before your country existed. The term soccer also came from us, but lets be honest it’s foot ball, you know, cause you use your feet and it’s a ball; unlike American Football, where you use your hands, and it’s an inflated egg.

    2. “I think that women have more to prove then men do, so they don’t try to pull these kinds of stunts. They want to be seen as serious competitors and diving would only ruin their credibility.”

      this was my first thought, too.

  22. Or maybe it’s that women bleed more easily because they have thinner skin…

  23. I’m pretty sure an analysis of baseball players would find far, far fewer faked injuries.

    On the “football” vs. “soccer” vs. “hand-egg” tip, you do realize that (a) it’s a legitimate thing, linguistically, for people in different countries to have different names for the same thing, that (b) the U.S. is not the only country that calls it soccer, that (c) there are in fact (and have historically been) many numerous types of football played around the world (and, indeed, at different English schools) and that many of them do not involve a round ball and that many of them do involve a considerable amount of carrying the ball in hands. There is evidence that the term “football” refers to the fact that the game is played on foot, rather than on horseback.

    As Wikipedia puts it, “Unqualified, the word football applies to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears, including American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby league, rugby union and other related games.”

  24. This just in, most male sportsman are deeply self-centered. Thought you might like the tip.

  25. It’s really simple, the idea is that if someone commits a foul against you, it’s in the best interest for your team that the arbiter notices.

    So you react just like a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers when hit.

  26. alang has it. There’s so much more money involved and the stakes are so much higher that the men have to play as dirty as possible. Women, I believe, are ‘allowed’ a little more honour at this present time.

    1. That’s not “playing dirty”, that’s called “being a whore”.

      Hockey, now there is a sport that is played dirty from the schoolyard to the major leagues.

  27. These acting routines and fake crybaby tantrums are one of the things about soccer that I just can’t abide. I grew up playing soccer and still like to watch games, but these all too frequent sad displays are shameful. You know somebody’s not really hurt when they put on this routine and then don’t get the call and immediately return to playing like nothing happened. Seems to go against all notions of sportsmanship.

  28. All this snark (and half-assed misogyny thinly disguised as ‘genetics’) and NOBODY is critical of how the researchers operationalized “injury”!?! CMON SON! They could have at least triangulated their obsevations with doctors reports or team injury reports. This isn’t good science, y’all.

    I expected better from the boingboing crowd.

  30. Well, Christine Sinclair, captain of the Canadian women’s national soccer team, had her nose broken by an elbow during the game against Germany in this World Cup and insisted on playing on. She ended up scoring later in the game. Now that’s tenacity.

  31. It’s really odd to use “whether the player left the field for a substantial period” as an indicator for this. Perhaps women simply choose to play through fewer injuries than men. This would make some sense since the salaries for men are significantly higher and being seen as easily injuried hurts your salary potential.

  32. Follow the money.

    That accounts for the M/F discrepancy in the same sport. If you are getting paid $x*10^7€ you have a pretty strong incentive to work the system and make sure it stays that way. Especially when there is a large differential between the top tier earners and the rest.

    Don’t even bother with cross-sport comparisons because it doesn’t matter.

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