Football

WSJ coming through with shite analysis

ftfy.

what does this really tell you? there's a more interesting story to be told here; it sort of manages it, but it's hard to see. OK, so Brazil got tackled more than Bosnia & Herz and Greece and Argentina spent broadly the same time writhing on the floor.

It should have been done by average minutes spent on the floor per 'injury'.

and yes, I like stats...so I ranked by that metric.

apart from that...this:

Wow. Possibly the dumbest article I have ever had the misfortune to read.

During the first 32 games, there were 302 players who could be seen at some point rolling around in pain, crumpling into a fetal position or lying lifeless on the pitch as the referee stopped the match. These theatrical episodes ate up a total of 132 minutes of clock, a metric we have decided to call "writhing time."

But it was nice of them to add this little caveat.

To be fair, it is actually possible to get hurt playing soccer

Even if they did immediately dismiss it by adding

There were nine injuries in total that forced players to be substituted from the game and to miss, or potentially miss, a match. These were discarded. That left 293 cases of potential embellishment that collectively took up 118 minutes, 21 seconds.

So let's actually consider how many of these 293 cases were likely embellishment.
Later the article states.

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 "injuries" and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 "injuries" and almost four times as much writhing.

That is actually one the only worthwhile parts of this article but two things come from it that really highlight what nonsense the article is overall.
Firstly I don't understand the discrepancy in the numbers, now we have 143 injuries yet before the article stated 293 injuries, which is it?
Secondly it is safe to assume of the 40 injuries to players on losing teams there was no embellishment for time wasting though I accept it is possible 1 or 2 may have been feigning injury trying to get a player booked.
Even so on face value that means we can deduct 40 from the possible embellishment category and then we can also extrapolate that a similar amount of real injuries occurred to winning teams players so we can take away another 40. That means only 63 of the injuries should be considered as potentially being truly embellished and who knows what the real value is there? I would say as an absolute minimum at least half would be players in real pain leaving around 30. That is a rather different number to the 293 cases the article claims should be considered as players feigning injury or potential embellishment.

On top of that the article refers to flopping and not feigning injury in the headline, they are two different things.

It never ceases to amaze me the depths some authors will go to in order to put a negative spin on soccer.