Iraola's threat to coach diving exposes a flaw referees must fix

Key takeaways

• A foul in football is defined by what the defender does, not by whether the attacker ends up on the ground.
• In practice, officials read a fall as evidence of impact, which gives players a reason to go down when they are touched.
• The high bar for video review makes it harder to overturn a decision when the fouled player stayed upright.
• The lasting fix is consistent guidance that rewards honest players, because telling a squad to dive makes the incentive problem worse for everyone.

The argument: the incentive is real, but the remedy is wrong

The BBC reports that Andoni Iraola has said he will tell his players to go down in future. He said it after Liverpool were denied a penalty in Sunday's defeat by Arsenal. The report does not set out the full details of the incident, and this article does not try to rebuild them. Whether that particular decision was right is not known here and does not matter much to the argument. What matters is the logic of what he said: if staying upright costs you a penalty and falling over wins one, a rational coach will teach his players to fall.

That logic is hard to fault. Iraola's conclusion still deserves to be resisted. His comments diagnose the problem accurately and prescribe the wrong treatment. The incentive he describes is built into the way decisions are reached on the pitch and on review. Players cannot remove it by going down more often. Only the people who set and apply the standard can do that. If officiating rewards falling, the answer is to change officiating, not to fill the game with players acting out contact.

The case rests on three mechanisms: how referees gather information, how video review is limited, and how the risks for an attacker are weighted.

Evidence one: a fall is information, and referees are short of information

The Laws of the Game, written by the International Football Association Board, do not require a player to fall for a foul to be given. Tripping, holding, pushing and charging an opponent carelessly, recklessly or with excessive force are offences whatever the fouled player does next. A defender who clips an attacker's standing leg has committed the same offence whether the attacker stumbles on or goes to ground. In law, the question is about the defender's action.

The referee's real job is different. They have to decide in real time, often from an imperfect angle, with bodies in the way. They cannot feel the contact. They can only infer it from what they see, and the clearest visible sign of a meaningful challenge is its effect on the player who received it. A player who goes down sends an unmistakable signal. A player who carries on running sends one too, and it is usually read as "not enough to matter".

So the gap between law and practice is not a failing of individual referees. It comes from reaching decisions with incomplete information. A fall, genuine or not, fills in the missing evidence. A player who stays upright out of honesty, balance or a wish to reach the ball is withholding the very evidence the official uses. The system quietly reads integrity as an absence of evidence.

The advantage provision in the laws makes this worse. A referee who sees a player keep going after contact may reasonably let play continue, expecting the attack to benefit. In open play that is sensible. In the penalty area, letting play run on and then seeing the move fade can leave the attacking side without the penalty they would have had if the player had simply fallen.

Evidence two: video review is built to defer to what happened on the field

Video review was meant to catch exactly the kind of decision Iraola complains about. Its design limits how far it can help. In the Premier League, as under the IFAB protocol, the video assistant is meant to step in only for a clear and obvious error or a serious missed incident. The aim is to keep the on-field referee as the main decision-maker and stop every marginal call being re-refereed from the booth.

That threshold works against the upright player. Footage of an attacker falling after contact gives reviewers a vivid image. They can check whether the contact was real and whether it caused the fall. Footage of an attacker who absorbs contact and keeps going is far more ambiguous. Reviewers have to judge whether the challenge was a foul even though its visible effect was small. That rarely meets the standard of a clear and obvious error. The more honestly a player responds to contact, the less likely the video assistant is to overturn a decision not to award a penalty.

This is why coaches' frustration has, if anything, grown in the video era. Review gives managers a sense that the truth is on tape and can be retrieved. Its threshold then stops that truth being acted on unless the original image is dramatic. A coach who asks how to make a foul "clear and obvious" on review gets an uncomfortable answer: make the consequence visible.

Evidence three: the risks are weighted towards going down

The third mechanism is the simple arithmetic of what a player stands to win and lose. Simulation is a cautionable offence under the laws: trying to deceive the referee by pretending to have been fouled counts as unsporting behaviour. In England, the Football Association also has a retrospective procedure for cases where a player has successfully deceived an official into a decision.

Those sanctions bite hardest on clear simulation, where there was no contact at all. They are much weaker when there was real contact and the player has exaggerated its effect. In that grey zone a referee is unlikely to caution a player for simulation, because there was something to react to. The decision to award or refuse the penalty then turns on how convincing the fall looked.

So an attacker who feels contact in the area faces a lopsided choice. Going down risks a small chance of a caution if the official decides the contact was trivial, and offers a real chance of a penalty. Staying up carries almost no disciplinary risk and offers a much smaller chance of a penalty. Any system that sets things up this way will, over time, teach players to fall. Iraola has simply said out loud what the incentives already suggest.

The case against: endorsing diving damages the game it is meant to fix

The strongest objection to this argument is that it lets coaches off too lightly. On this view, the laws are clear that players do not need to fall, and referees are trained and repeatedly told to judge contact rather than reactions. Talk of an incentive to dive becomes an excuse for gamesmanship that the sport has spent years trying to stamp out.

There is a collective action problem too. If one team adopts Iraola's approach, it may gain a short-term edge. If every team does the same, officials will become more sceptical of every fall. Genuine fouls will be waved away more often, and the honest player will be worse off than before. Coaching diving does not just exploit a flaw. It degrades the evidence referees rely on and makes their job harder for everyone, including the team that started it.

Then there is reputation and the wider game. Players who become known for going down easily may find officials less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Young players and grassroots footballers copy what they see at the top level, and a top-flight coach openly backing simulation sends a message that reaches far beyond one club. Finally, there is a fair reading of the comment itself. Something said in frustration straight after a defeat may not be a coaching policy at all, and treating it as one may overstate what was meant.

These points are serious, and the second is the most persuasive. They do not, however, remove the underlying incentive. They explain why coaches should not act on it. That supports the central claim: responsibility for removing the incentive lies with those who govern officiating, because asking individual teams to ignore their own interests is not a stable solution.

What would change this conclusion

Several kinds of evidence would weaken or overturn the argument. If published reviews of officiating showed that fouls on players who stayed upright were penalised as consistently as fouls followed by a fall, the claim that the system rewards going down would not hold. The Premier League's independent panel on key match incidents is one place where that evidence could appear, if its findings were broken down by whether the fouled player stayed on his feet.

The argument would also weaken if the video threshold were applied more readily to clear contact on players who carried on. That would show review is able to correct the information gap described above.

On the disciplinary side, more frequent retrospective action for exaggerating real contact, not just for diving with no contact at all, would change a player's calculation. If that grey zone became genuinely risky, the incentive to fall would shrink.

Finally, if teams that openly encouraged going down saw no gain, or even saw officials become less generous to them, the conclusion would shift. The problem would then be correcting itself, with less need for intervention from the governing bodies. Until evidence like this exists, the reasonable position is that Iraola has described a real incentive, and that the fix is for referees to remove it, not for players to exploit it.

Sources and further reading

• BBC Sport, report on Andoni Iraola's comments after the defeat by Arsenal, the starting point for this article
• International Football Association Board, the Laws of the Game, particularly Law 12 on fouls and misconduct
• Premier League, published material on the video assistant referee protocol and the key match incidents panel
• The Football Association, regulations on retrospective action for deceiving a match official