It’s official; Big Ibra will always give away more fouls than little Leo
With many still debating the qualities of FC Barcelona forward Zlatan Ibrahimovic, there appears to be one thing both cheerleader and nay-sayer can agree upon, and that is the amount of fouls the striker gives away.
Since his record-breaking transfer from Inter Milan in the summer, there is something the Swede has done more regularly than anything else and that is concede free-kicks. Whether it be in the air, on the ground, or even in the process of scoring goals, the lanky forward seems to have the knack for fouling.
So far this season, Ibra has given away an astonishing 72 fouls in 37 appearances for Barcelona. Compare that with Valencia’s David Villa who has played 36 games for Valencia, conceding 43 fouls in the process. Or even Ibra’s Barca colleague Lionel Messi who has played 43 games for Barca this season, conceding just 32 fouls.
Now it would be nice to see such stats as nothing more than an unfair advantage given to Villa and Messi, and thanks to official research we now can!
A group of academics from the Rotterdam school of Management in the Netherlands have researched the human tendency to connect size with strength and aggression, studying more than 100,000 fouls in domestic, European and International football. They found that taller players are more likely to be penalised by referees than their shorter counterparts.
So Ibra, who is 6′3, is much more likely to be deemed to be committing a foul, rather than little Leo or David Villa who stand at 5′7 and 5′9 respectively. Considering the amount of disallowed goals the Swede has to his name for fouls on defenders and goalkeepers so far this season, it seems such judgments may well end up effecting more than just the striker’s fouls conceded stats come the end of the season.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers set up panels of football fans who were shown mocked-up images of two players going in for a challenge; the panels then had to speculate on who would end up coming off worse from the tackle. The clear result being that the taller of the two players would more often than not be deemed to be the aggressor in most circumstances.
“You will always get moments in a game when the situation isn’t very clear and the referee has got to make a fast decision. This is where assumptions could influence them,” said Steffen Giessner, one of the co-authors of the research.
“There are, of course, lots of causes and effects taking place here. There is an effect with height, but we can’t say precisely how strong it is.”
The study, which was inspired by Geissner’s co-author, Niels van Quaquebeke, who as a keen amateur basketball player got the impression he was rarely penalised for fouls he committed due to his relative lack of height, found that players who were between 6cm and 10cm taller than their opponents were blamed for almost 60% of fouls.
“It’s very much about visible height difference. The effect is much stronger the greater the differences in height,” said van Quaquebeke.
Although the researchers claimed that this effect may come down to the dominance of tall defenders fouling shorter forwards, in Ibra’s case the hypothesis doesn’t stand up, what with him often being as tall, if not taller, than the centre-backs he comes up against. But with the data from the research also showing that most fouls in a game are committed by shorter midfield players, then perhaps there is another reason for Ibra giving away so many needless free-kicks. Perhaps he is just as slow and clumsy as his critics suggest? Or perhaps, as a taller player, he is naturally more aggresive?
It’s hard to tell, but with so many free kicks conceded, often for almost invisible indiscretions, it would surely seem that Zlatan is often on the wrong-end of some sort of prejudice from referees, wouldn’t it?
But of course with the rough comes the smooth. If Ibra gives away far too many fouls, then Messi more than makes up for it with the number of fouls he gets given in his favour. In the 43 games Messi has played this season, he has been fouled 102 times (by official stats that is), whilst Ibra has been fouled 40 times in his 37 appearances. So maybe we shouldn’t complain too much. Should Ibra be eternally doomed to concede cheap free-kicks then Messi is eternally blessed to receive them. As such it would seem the good grace more than evens itself out.
Still it must be frustrating for Ibrahimovic to be permanently judged to be fouling those around him just because of his size and style of play, so maybe we should be a little more forgiving when he lets his petulance get the better of him from time to time. He’s a big softy really, who just wants a few decisions to go his way from time to time. Unfortunately, if this research is anything to go by, it seems there is little he can do to clean up his act.
Post-script
For the stat fans amongst us, Ibra’s predecessor at Barcelona, Samuel Eto’o, who stands at 5′9”, has given away 45 fouls in 37 games this season, and has been awarded 52 fouls. Last season he played in 49 games for Barca giving away 36 fouls, and picking up 49 free-kicks. This may make for interesting reading what with Samu’s constant chasing and closing down of defenders, but it’s the bottom line that counts with strikers and that bottom line is goals. Eto’o has 47 goals over the last two seasons in club competition, Ibra has 49, so perhaps the Swede shouldn’t feel quite so bad about that huge amount of fouls he gives away.
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