Drawing the foul: Diving and visuality in contemporary english football

Abstract

On April 2, 2014, the Twitter representatives of German soccer magazine 11Freunde posted one of their occasional “Bei der Geburt getrennt” (“separated at birth”) vignettes, which typically attempt to milk humour out of visual similarities between a footballer and some other, culturally disparate figure. The diptych concerned the European Champions League quarterfinal tie between Manchester United and Bayern Munich played earlier that evening. Controversy had surrounded the referee’s decision to send off Bayern’s Bastian Schweinsteiger for a second bookable offence late in the game, a sliding tackle on United’s Wayne Rooney. The latter was widely judged to have made the Bavarian’s tackle look more brutal than it really was. Rooney thus stood accused of an offence that is officially prohibited in professional soccer under the rubric of “simulation," following a ruling of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in March 1999.