Fifa World Cup 2018: Neymar and the art of the dive

According to one statistic, Neymar has spent 14 minutes on the ground during the World Cup

Alarm bells rang inside Jim Calder’s brain earlier this week as he watched Neymar, the Brazilian soccer superstar, squirm on the grass and cry out in apparent distress.
 
“Neymar does what all beginning actors do,” he said. “They oversell the event.”
 
Calder would know. For three decades he has taught acting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His voice has been consistently hoarse this summer, a consequence of yelling at students all day at a theatre workshop he runs every year in Florence, Italy. Yet when the classes have ended, when he turns on the television to watch the World Cup at night, he continues to have his thespian tastes affronted.
 
The same thing happens every four years: On the biggest stage in sports, some of the world’s best soccer talents reveal themselves to be D-list actors. They pantomime pain. They exaggerate like silent film stars. They don’t seem to care who sees.
 
While the players’ theatrics are provoking a familiar hand-wringing ritual among soccer purists, they are drawing a different, more specialised sort of attention from acting coaches like Calder, who have trouble quieting their professional impulses while watching the tournament.

 
“I will say I’ve been impressed by these players’ commitment to their choices,” said Peter Kelley, the acting coach on the set of the television series NCIS: Los Angeles. “When an actor has a moment — you open the door, you see your wife’s body on the floor — you have to commit. Do I break down crying? Am I numb?”
 
“And when your choice as a player is, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever walk again,’ you can’t go halfway,” he added.
 
Most will agree that Neymar has not gone halfway at this World Cup. While leading Brazil to the quarterfinal round with his electric play, he has also committed considerable energy to ensuring that the world — as well as the referee — understands his pain.
 
Things reached melodramatic heights on Monday night when his rather overstated reaction to having his foot stepped on during Brazil’s 2-0 win over Mexico earned him a round of condemnation in the soccer world and a tidal wave of playful derision on social media.
 
“He’s one of the best five players in the world — why do you need this acting? For what?” Lothar Matthäus, a former captain of Germany’s national team, said.

 
Playacting has various purposes in soccer. Players flop to draw a foul or feign innocence (or even injury) to avoid one. They nurse imaginary wounds to waste time. They embellish contact to make pedestrian fouls seem far worse, hoping to coax a referee to present a yellow or red card to the perceived offender.
 
Philippa Strandberg-Long, an acting coach from London, has found the players’ World Cup histrionics frustrating, too. As a soccer fan, she feels the playacting diminishes the game; as an acting teacher, she feels it diminishes the art form.
 
A proponent of the Meisner technique — acting is reacting — Strandberg-Long highlighted a basic lesson about proportional responses called “the pinch and the ouch” as relevant to the World Cup. An acting student who is pinched, she said, should not tumble out of his or her chair. A soccer player who is hit in the arm should not grab his face. The audience, in both cases, will not enjoy that.
 
“If you have a response that doesn’t correspond to the event, we won’t empathise, we won’t believe you, and we’ll start to question why,” said Strandberg-Long, who has a son in the youth academy of the London soccer club Millwall. “Either you are lying or you’re psychologically ill.”

 
“We have this urge to exaggerate to make people believe us,” she added. “But a lot of the time it has the opposite effect.”
 
Despite a mountain of evidence and bad movie cameos to dispute this, Kelley insisted that professional athletes could in fact make good actors. In the 1990s, he coached the NBA. player Rick Fox, who appeared in several films and television shows while playing for the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. Kelley said he and Fox sometimes discussed the finer points of flopping on the basketball court, evaluating the good and bad performers around the league.
 
That may feel true to those watching the World Cup, where few of the 32 teams could claim not to have tried to influence a situation with a bit of role-playing.
 
Kelley scolded the players who failed to remember that the audience does not only watch the main actor in a scene.
 
“You see the teammates standing around like they’re waiting for the show to end,” he said. “Improvisation is a team sport.”

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