Rates of embellishment in Football vs Rugby

spark_sara

I was able to quickly find the penalty stats for the National Hockey League. In the 2022-23 season, there were 24 cases of embellishment, which is a 2 minute penalty, giving the opposition a 2 minute power play, although usually if there is an embellishment penalty, there is a corresponding penalty for the other team, tripping, spearing, or some such. For anyone unaware of what embellishment is, it might also be known as diving, or flopping and...

Originally asked by CGCampbell on Stack Exchange (sports) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

There's an old saying that "football is a gentleman's game played by yobs, rugby [union] is a yob's game played by gentlemen". The root of this is essentially classist, in that rugby union was an amateur sport until 1995, so could only be played by relatively well paid people who could afford to take time off work for training and matches - i.e. the upper classes. Whether as a consequence of this or for other reasons, there has always been a much higher standard of respect for the referee in rugby union than there has in football, and while I don't have direct evidence for it, I'm pretty sure that sports with higher levels of respect for the referee are less likely to try to deceive the...

Full answer by Philip Kendall: https://sports.stackexchange.com/a/29542 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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