Gary Lineker: Diving Is Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Combat

The increase in players diving in the Premier League has come to partially blight this season, with two of the leading contenders for the Player of the Year awards, Liverpool’s Luis Suarez and Tottenham Hotspur’s Gareth Bale, actually among the main offenders. 

Just last week Bale was booked for diving against Inter Milan in the Europa League, and at the start of the year, Suarez admitted to diving to win a penalty in a game against Stoke City last October. 

The former England captain Gary Lineker, one of the game’s finest-ever strikers with Everton, Barcelona and Tottenham believes it is becoming increasingly hard to combat the spread of diving and differentiate between what is a dive and a genuine fall. 

“Diving is a really, really difficult one, because a player is the only one who genuinely knows whether they have dived,” Lineker told me. “You can look at it at 40 different angles and not know.” 

“There are two different forms of diving, going down when you don’t get touched at all, and the other is different when you use your own skills to gain an advantage. Half of it is enticing players to foul you, that’s not diving, if you’re clever enough to beat a player, and he puts a foot in and you hit that foot, that is a foul.” 

“It’s always been the case if you get a decent touch you go down, but you could have stayed up. There is a fundamental difference between doing that and knocking it past someone and just flying up in the air.” 

“I never dived myself: A dive is when there is no contact, but there have been plenty of times when I have known if I can just get the ball ahead of the goalkeeper he will hit me, but I could have leaped over him if I really, really had to.” 

So what can be done to stop blatant diving? Self regulation by the clubs seems the most obvious answer, but will managers ever condemn their own players for diving?

“Managers will never see it; it is not in their interests,” Lineker said.

Did Lineker ever admonish a teammate for diving?

“I remember Nayim at Tottenham dived all over the place, and we used to say to him ‘What are you doing?’ You do talk about it. But [elsewhere] it’s part of the game, it’s how they grow up, in Argentina it is about tricking the referee, they would never have the debates we have about diving.”

As a last resort, should the governing bodies in football take more action and issue retrospective bans for blatant diving?

“I think it has to be unbelievably obvious,” Lineker said.

All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.