Ornament and crime at the World Cup

I.

When, in the 72nd minute of a tense World Cup quarterfinal matchup on Saturday between Switzerland, a sneakily creative side ranked 14^th in the world and described by one analyst as “tactically flexible,” and Argentina, the tournament’s hateable but endlessly resourceful defending champions, the Swiss forward Breel Embolo was shown a red card and sent off, leaving his team one player short for the rest of the match, social media exploded with charges that the fix was in—that FIFA, which governs international soccer by means of what is generally agreed to be an elastic legal and ethical code, was doing everything in its power to safeguard the passage of Lionel Messi, the best player in the world and maybe of all time, into the semifinals. (“Infantino made the call!” cried the writer Zito Madu on X, referring to Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president.) If that was the plan, it worked: Argentina scored twice more, Messi was able to conserve a bit of energy once the pressure in the game slackened, and his team was on to face England for a spot in the World Cup final.

Embolo was penalized for what is known in the FIFA rulebook as “simulation,” which is to say pretending that he’d been violently brought down by Argentina’s Leandro Paredes near one sideline in the Argentine end. In truth, as video replays soon showed from several angles, the players had slipped past each other without so much as their shoelaces touching (although the space between them could best be measured in millimeters). Embolo, because he is a world-class footballer, reacted as if he’d been taken out by a sniper, thrusting his chest out as he fell, throwing his head back, stretching one arm rigidly behind him, splaying his legs to the side and then, once he hit the grass, executing four full side rolls toward the Argentine bench while clutching his left leg in apparent agony, his face frozen in a toothy mask (I was going to say “a rictus,” but thought better of it) of pain. As it turned out, the putative shooter had worse aim than Thomas Crooks.

II.

This kind of embellishment is common in soccer, a deeply melodramatic sport that can verge, depending on who’s playing, on the rococo. The tactic often makes good strategic sense, as the game is so wide-open and free-flowing, and played on such a giant field, that referees can miss even hard fouls if the victim doesn’t exaggerate the contact with enough drama to attract and hold their attention, often not just by falling but screaming too. The behavior doesn’t bother me as much as it does the pundits who love to speculate that it’s one of the barriers keeping soccer from reaching NFL-level popularity in the U.S. After all, diving (even wholly inventing a foul) adds to the sport’s operatic intensity: as in a high-level production at the Met, the skill and passion are real, but they’re packaged in a way that can be easily grasped from the last row. Aficionados, in both cases, know that the absurdity is a small price to pay for the really sublime moments, even if you have to wait hours for one to arrive.

Still, in recent years, the performative writhing grew so extreme, so Laocoönesque, that FIFA decided to refine the punishment for fakery, expanding the number of cases where it can be reviewed via video replay. There are four categories of simulation: feigning contact; exaggerating contact; feigning injury; and anticipating contact that may or may not arrive. Embolo was guilty on three of the four counts—all but exaggerating contact, since there was no contact to exaggerate in the first place.

III.

FIFA’s position on embellishment been buffeted by some of the same moralistic currents that have shaped debates about ornament and decoration in architecture. As Antoine Picon has written, “One thing is certain: ornament represents a delicate issue.”