Strikers should not have to go down to win penalties they have earned

Key takeaways

• Under the Laws of the Game, a foul is decided by what the defender did, not by how the attacker reacted to it.
• A high threshold for VAR intervention makes the on-field referee's first impression decisive, and that first impression is shaped by a player falling or appealing.
• If players have to exaggerate contact to get fouls given, honesty becomes a competitive disadvantage and trust in every decision erodes.
• The strongest counter-argument is that referees can only judge what they see, so a player who stays upright is in effect hiding the evidence.

The burden belongs with the officials, not the player

The BBC reports that Liverpool believe Alexander Isak should have been given a penalty against Arsenal. It also reports that the striker did not appeal for the decision and that the video assistant referee did not intervene. The BBC asks the uncomfortable question that follows: should he have made more of it?

The question is reasonable, and anyone who has played the game will see why it gets asked. But the answer should be no. Accepting that a forward ought to exaggerate contact means accepting that the system for judging fouls works properly only when players perform for it. That is a weakness in officiating, not a lack of nous in the player.

The argument here is not that this particular incident was or was not a foul. This article does not claim to know the precise nature of the contact, and the reporting summarised above does not settle it. The point is about the structure. Whether a defender commits an offence should not depend on how dramatically the attacker reacts. When outcomes start to depend on that reaction, the incentives point the wrong way, and the remedy lies with the people and processes that make the decisions.

Three pieces of evidence support that position: what the laws actually say, how the VAR protocol shapes on-field decisions, and what happens to a sport's integrity when theatre is rewarded.

The laws define a foul by the defender's action

Law 12 of the Laws of the Game, maintained by the International Football Association Board, lists the offences that lead to a direct free kick, or to a penalty if committed inside the defender's own area. They include tripping, pushing, holding, charging, and making contact with an opponent while challenging for the ball, when done carelessly, recklessly or with excessive force. Holding an opponent and impeding an opponent with contact are offences in their own right.

The wording looks at the person committing the offence. It asks whether the challenge was careless, whether the hold stopped an opponent moving, whether the push was illegitimate. Nothing in it requires the fouled player to lose their footing, cry out or appeal to the referee. A shirt pulled hard enough to slow a runner is a foul whether the runner falls over or keeps going.

The same law treats the opposite behaviour as misconduct. A player who tries to deceive the referee, for instance by pretending to have been fouled, can be cautioned for unsporting behaviour. So the rulebook sets out a clear moral order. Fouls are punished because of what the offender did, and pretending to be fouled is punished because it corrupts that judgement.

When a player who stays upright is criticised for not "making more of it", the criticism quietly turns this order upside down. It suggests the attacker should get closer to the behaviour the laws penalise in order to get the decision the laws already allow. A rulebook that has to be gamed to work as written is not working as written.

VAR's high threshold turns the referee's first impression into everything

The second piece of evidence is procedural. VAR does not re-referee matches. Under the protocol, video assistants step in only for a clear and obvious error, or a serious missed incident, in a narrow set of match-changing situations, including penalty decisions. In the Premier League the threshold for intervention has been publicly described as high, with the stated aim of keeping the on-field referee's authority intact and limiting disruption.

That design choice has a consequence that is easy to miss. The higher the threshold, the more the decision rests on what the on-field referee sees in real time. And in real time, a player falling is a powerful signal. It draws the eye, it suggests force, and it presents the referee with an incident that needs a ruling. A player who keeps running presents nothing of the kind. The same contact can be read as an offence in one case and as play continuing in the other.

Once a referee has decided play should go on, the video assistant has to judge whether that call was clearly and obviously wrong, not simply whether it was wrong. Subtle contact on a player who stayed on his feet rarely meets that bar, because the absence of a reaction can itself be taken as a sign that the contact had little effect. The BBC's account fits this pattern: no appeal from the player, no intervention from the VAR.

The point here is about how the system is built. A protocol meant to correct only the most glaring errors will tend to lock in whatever impression the first look produced. If that first look depends on the attacker's reaction, the protocol ends up rewarding reactions. That is a fixable design problem: through referee training on holds and contact that do not cause a fall, through guidance on what counts as clear and obvious, and through how video officials are told to weigh an incident on its merits rather than on the drama around it.

Rewarding exaggeration corrodes trust in every decision

The third piece of evidence concerns the game as a whole. Football's decisions are accepted largely because players, coaches and supporters believe they are broadly fair. That belief rests on fouls being given for fouls.

When exaggeration becomes the normal way to get a decision, three things go wrong. First, honest players are put at a disadvantage, and anyone who refuses to fall loses out to those who will. Second, referees have to treat every fall with suspicion, which raises the chance of real fouls being dismissed as play-acting. Third, supporters lose the ability to tell one from the other, so every penalty comes with doubt attached and every appeal starts to look like a performance.

There is also a coaching side. If the lesson from high-profile incidents is that staying upright costs you, young players will learn it. The habits of the professional game spread downwards into academies and grassroots football, where there is no video review at all and where the referee's trust in what players do matters even more.

A sport that wants to keep the moral weight of its laws cannot leave the cost of an officiating blind spot on the shoulders of the players who behave as those laws intend.

The strongest case against: referees can only judge what they see

The opposing argument deserves to be put fairly, because it is not cynical. It goes like this. Football is played at speed, by officials with one viewing angle and a fraction of a second. A referee cannot give a foul they have not seen, and a player's reaction is legitimate information. If a forward is held and plays on, they are hiding the evidence of the offence. Going down, or at least clearly showing that contact happened, is not deception. It is communication.

The argument has more to it. It makes a distinction between inventing contact and responding to it. A player who is genuinely held while sprinting may lose balance, and letting that loss of balance show is not cheating. Supporters of this view would say the laws ban pretending to be fouled, not reacting honestly to being fouled, and that an attacker who has a real case and stays silent has given up something their team was entitled to.

There is a professional-duty point too. A striker plays for a team, and the team has a fair claim on every advantage the laws allow. Seen that way, choosing not to show an offence is not neutral virtue. It is a decision that affects team-mates.

Finally, defenders know where the threshold sits. If an attacker will never go down, a defender can hold and grapple with less risk. On this view, a credible willingness to go to ground when fouled is part of what keeps defending honest.

All of this has weight. Where it falls short is that it accepts the present system's weakness as permanent. It is a sound argument about how to win under current conditions, not about how the conditions should be. And the line between showing contact and exaggerating it gets very thin in practice, which is exactly why rewarding reactions is so corrosive.

What evidence would change this conclusion

Several kinds of evidence would weaken or reverse the position taken here.

If systematic reviews by refereeing bodies showed that fouls on players who stay upright are given no less often than fouls on players who fall, once the severity of contact is accounted for, the core concern would disappear. The problem would then lie with individual decisions, not with a structural incentive. This article does not have such data, and it is not known here whether it exists in a form that would settle the question.

If changes to referee training and VAR guidance aimed at non-falling contact were tried and made no measurable difference, that would suggest officials really cannot pick up these offences without a visible reaction, and the case for players communicating contact would get much stronger.

If evidence emerged that harsher enforcement against simulation simply led to more real fouls going unpunished, it would show that the two problems cannot be separated as neatly as this argument assumes.

And if the game's lawmakers explicitly endorsed the idea that a visible reaction is a legitimate part of establishing a foul, the normative basis of this argument would change. Until then, the laws say what they say: a foul is defined by the person who commits it.

Sources and further reading

• BBC Sport: reporting on Liverpool's view of the penalty claim involving Alexander Isak against Arsenal, and the wider debate it prompted.
• International Football Association Board: the Laws of the Game, especially Law 12 on fouls and misconduct.
• IFAB VAR protocol documentation: the principles governing when video assistant referees may intervene.
• Premier League and its refereeing body: public explanations of how VAR thresholds are applied in the competition.