Another article that I found courtesy of Zonal Marking's Twitter feed — the maiden post from a blog called Mindgames that seeks to apply knowledge of sport psychology to English Premier League soccer.  This post discusses an academic paper on diving in football — how to spot it, behaviors associated with it, motivations for doing it.  I thought that two of the findings were very interesting: one, that football fans are generally very good at spotting diving, and two, that knowledgeable and neophyte football fans are equally able to spot dives.  I'm not going to summarize the entire blog post here, especially considering that it's his first post, so do check it out.

For my friends in the basketball analytics community, it would be interesting to find out if similar research has been done with regards to diving/flopping in basketball, which has regrettably spread like a virus from the major soccer leagues to the NBA.