Another interesting example involves - not taboos, but straight up embarassing-looking plays. In a soccer penalty kick, what roughly speaking happens is that the shooter kicks the ball left, right or center. The goalkeeper starts in the center and has to simultaneously guess which direction to dive in (or to stay still, if it's a center shot) to catch the ball. You'd expect players to pick each direction about a third of the time, but I believe they statistically pick center much less often. That's because, if they shoot the ball straight at the goalkeeper in the center and he stays still and easily catches it, they look like a dummy!
Yes! And there's a version where they kick it center very slowly and it trickles in. I think its called a Panenka, and its pretty close to being a taboo play isn't it?
it was initially seen as disrespectful, but not anymore. however, when you’re shooting a penalty kick (which players make around 80% of the time) the last thing some want is to look stupid as the shot softly lands in the hands of the keeper
I don't think panenkas are taboo, but they're high-risk in terms of reputation. The usual view is that the taker looks very cool if they score and very silly if they don't.
I didn't know that! My soccer knowledge is lacking, apparently. But I think it's cool how some kinds of plays are explicitly taboo and will make you lose face outright, while others become... implicitly taboo? Because they're inherently embarassing?
If there was a magical technique to increase your sports winrate by 10% but it involved doing the chicken dance and twerking in front of everyone before the game, my suspicion is that basically no professional athlete would do it, even the ones who are paid millions of dollars to win as much as possible.
Look at some of the examples of diving or faking an injury in soccer. There are some top players willing to do it, see for example Neymar's famous acting performances. Comes pretty close to "chicken dance and twerking" especially since everyone but the ref could see in the slow motion that he was not even fouled.
In soccer another complication is that it is perhaps the most international team sport and the taboos vary quite a lot from culture to culture. E.g. diving in British football is highly taboo, not so in Italian football.
Now that there are video assistants this kind of stuff has become rare. I think a lot of this comes down to soccer simply having many bad rules and a stubborn refusal by reactionary officials to bring them to the present century.
Another example is that in soccer the clock does not get stopped during an interruption. Instead the ref determines how much "overtime" is to be played. This used to be pretty much always less than time actually spent in interruptions. So there is an incentive to fake injuries. Nowadays the refs are admonished to be very precise with overtime. But the problem has still not completely disappeared. All the while a simple technical solution is available that most other team sports have adopted.
I think neither the Panenka nor the corner camping time play you describe are all that taboo today in soccer.
A remaining strong taboo is to continue playing while a player is injured. Normally if this happens the ref interrupts the game but sometimes they don't notice immediately or want to wait and see if the player will get back up (faking an injury is also somewhat taboo but still frequently done).
The team in possession of the ball is supposed to kick it out in this circumstance. It is a big taboo not to do this. There are even instances where a team that scored while an opponent player was injured apologised and let the opposing team score a goal in return or intentionally scored an own-goal.
I agree that embarrassment is a big part of it. Presumably part of the taboo against the underhand serve is that involves an element of trickery and makes your opponent look stupid.
In general, humiliating your opponent in some way is often seen as bad sportsmanship and may even open you up to "righteous" retribution by your opponent. A "nutmeg" in soccer involves passing the ball through an opposing player's legs. This is usually ok to do once if it brings a genuine advantage but doing this repeatedly to someone is considered taboo in some circles. You can expect the other player to retaliate by fouling you quite severely and some refs might look the other way on that.
It used to happen to me quite a lot when I was a tall, lanky and just not very good defender in our local soccer group. It was very much a family, everyone is welcome kind of thing with a lot of dad-son pairs participating. One of the smaller, nimble teenagers had fun playing the ball through my legs. Naturally, I could not retaliate by fouling a 13 year old... Eventually, his dad took him aside and warned him in very stern words about this behavior, making it clear to him that eventually someone might put him in the hospital over it.
This is a big theme in Malcolm Gladwell’s old book on underdogs, “David and Goliath”. He goes through lots of great examples of underdogs exploiting taboos, like in guerrilla warfare, or in war games, even a middle school girls basketball team that decides to full court press on literally every possession—apparently opposing coaches were irate about it.
I’m also reminded of some Freakonomics reporting maybe like 20 years ago arguing that NFL coaches are too risk-averse on fourth down: apparently they punt way more than the odds alone would predict. The going hypothesis is that they’re trying to save their jobs (which is a way of saving face, I guess?), rather than win the game.
This is one of many issues discussed in philosopher David Papineau's book "Knowing The Score". Am I right in thinking that it's still considered underhand in tennis to hit the ball directly at an opponent at the net? There's also the curious expectation that one should always apologise for winning a point with a lucky net-cord - but nobody expects their opponent to apologise if the net-cord bounces backwards.
Mankading, by the way, is the exact cricketing equivalent of the pick-off in baseball.
In fact, in 2023 the MCC reaffirmed that mankading is a legal dismissal and challenged batters to stop leaving their crease before the bowler delivers the ball if they don't want to be dismissed. Another notable thing is that the taboo is very strong in Australia, England, NZ, South Africa, but most of the recent mankad dismissals have been performed by Indian and West Indian players.
The taboo has never been particularly strong in these regions (this type of dismissal is named for Vinno Mankad, an Indian captain who controversially did it against Australia in 1947) so I suspect the shifting taboo is most likely due to India now being the dominant force in cricket.
I could look it up but…I wonder if bunting in baseball was taboo at some point? It seems a lot like a tennis drop shot, an underpowered thing that’s hard to counter especially if the defense isn’t expecting it.
According to my 10 second AI query, bunting is taboo when done for a hit to break a no-hitter in the late innings, and when done with a very sizeable lead. If these are true, the latter looks like something to do with humiliating an opponent, the first has to do with some kind of idea that you're not playing to win, you're playing to prevent an achievement by the opposing team.
So fun to think about this stuff! One dimension I didn’t see evaluated was whether some taboos exist more due to the difficulty of writing a clear rule. maybe it is really hard to write an explicit rule forbidding a drop shot without causing unintended shifts to closely related play. it is easier to socially suppress (“you know it when you see it”) than to play whack-a-mole with rulesets.
also - maybe taboos are inevitable and selected for, when it comes to increasing popularity and engagement. social media has shown us that divisiveness increases engagement, and taboo violations provide a very ripe ground for argumentation and deliberation in addition to what written rules provide. it also enhances community, “inside knowledge” and all. so it perhaps isn’t in the best interest of a sporting body to make things too rigid. ✨balance in all things✨, heh
100%. I think this has to be true of some taboos. I just wrote a whole book about rules and discretion here: https://wwnorton.com/books/fewer-rules-better-people. It occurred to me that the "oblique knee kicks" in cage-fighting has to be a version of this. You can't prohibit kicking the calves, or the thigh, these are paradigmatic good fighting strategies. And kicking the side of the knees is right in between them, so you can't formulate such a rule.
i think flops arent considered sissy because its understood that refs will miss genuine fouls so the intention is to gain back what has been lost due to imperfect reffing. i.e. sell the call. its different from the taboos mentioned because it depends on the subjective interpretation of a third party.
From my observation, one of the mechanisms of how the taboos get eroded is the arrival of a new set of players who are unaware of the "unwritten" rules and/or impervious to the sanctions for violating them.
Imagine a spaceship arrived loaded with alien tennis players. The spaceship hovered in orbit, the aliens rode a shuttle down, played their tennis match, then shuttled back up to the ship.
I would expect that they would use underhand serves where it made sense. And if they had success doing so, others would start copying them.
For the aesthetic ones, particularly at the professional level, there may be a Kantian logic that if certain tactics were universally adopted, it would degrade the sport as an entertainment product, so people don't use it.
On example mentioned elsewhere was Malcom Gladwell's discussion of the full court press. It might be fun to see one instance of a team overcoming a much more talented team by deploying a full-court press. But if that emerged as a reliable way to neutralize a talent disparity, it would ruin the appeal of basketball, as people watch basketball to see stars excel, not be thwarted by tactics. And the league would enact written rules (or interpretations of existing rules) to make it less effective, as baseball has done.
In theory, this shouldn't effect lower level play, where commercial appeal isn't a concern. But professional culture obviously impacts the culture elsewhere, and those levels are mode concerned with skill development than wins and losses, so the taboo goes there as well.
Nice post! Though I wouldn't say that taking the ball to the corner is taboo in football/soccer. It's frustrating for the other team, but it's not considered dirty play. What is taboo is playing on when a player is down injured. See for example the controversy in this game: https://youtu.be/iUAxqig6GQE?si=QVmo_4YLHi1kcAA0.
I remember watching Michael Chang use an underarm serve in at the French Open and it totally changed the momentum of the match. I thought it was amazing.
Surely a very large fraction of sports taboos (unambiguously exemplified by the "granny") lies in the fact that the main foundational function of sports is mate selection in adolescence and young adulthood? Most sport is played to win in a manner that advertises sexually desirable forms of strength, coordination, stamina, perception, cleverness, resilience and (in team sports) communication and other social skills. Apart from the small fraction of sporting activity for which winning directly produces profit, nerdishly optimizing for win rate is a trap.
You can also try to explain it by way of war, as most sports arose in ancient societies to highlight the very skills and physiques had by the most elite warriors.
True, but I think the warrior explanation is almost fully encompassed by the sexual selection explanation, as the capacities required of a good warrior were the primary desirable traits for males in those societies. The rise of less martial sports like baseball or even billiards seems to correlate with a shift in desirable traits as civilization develops, and the rise of women's sports also seems to track my above list of traits becoming increasingly desired in women.
Another interesting example involves - not taboos, but straight up embarassing-looking plays. In a soccer penalty kick, what roughly speaking happens is that the shooter kicks the ball left, right or center. The goalkeeper starts in the center and has to simultaneously guess which direction to dive in (or to stay still, if it's a center shot) to catch the ball. You'd expect players to pick each direction about a third of the time, but I believe they statistically pick center much less often. That's because, if they shoot the ball straight at the goalkeeper in the center and he stays still and easily catches it, they look like a dummy!
Yes! And there's a version where they kick it center very slowly and it trickles in. I think its called a Panenka, and its pretty close to being a taboo play isn't it?
it was initially seen as disrespectful, but not anymore. however, when you’re shooting a penalty kick (which players make around 80% of the time) the last thing some want is to look stupid as the shot softly lands in the hands of the keeper
I don't think panenkas are taboo, but they're high-risk in terms of reputation. The usual view is that the taker looks very cool if they score and very silly if they don't.
I didn't know that! My soccer knowledge is lacking, apparently. But I think it's cool how some kinds of plays are explicitly taboo and will make you lose face outright, while others become... implicitly taboo? Because they're inherently embarassing?
If there was a magical technique to increase your sports winrate by 10% but it involved doing the chicken dance and twerking in front of everyone before the game, my suspicion is that basically no professional athlete would do it, even the ones who are paid millions of dollars to win as much as possible.
Look at some of the examples of diving or faking an injury in soccer. There are some top players willing to do it, see for example Neymar's famous acting performances. Comes pretty close to "chicken dance and twerking" especially since everyone but the ref could see in the slow motion that he was not even fouled.
In soccer another complication is that it is perhaps the most international team sport and the taboos vary quite a lot from culture to culture. E.g. diving in British football is highly taboo, not so in Italian football.
Now that there are video assistants this kind of stuff has become rare. I think a lot of this comes down to soccer simply having many bad rules and a stubborn refusal by reactionary officials to bring them to the present century.
Another example is that in soccer the clock does not get stopped during an interruption. Instead the ref determines how much "overtime" is to be played. This used to be pretty much always less than time actually spent in interruptions. So there is an incentive to fake injuries. Nowadays the refs are admonished to be very precise with overtime. But the problem has still not completely disappeared. All the while a simple technical solution is available that most other team sports have adopted.
I think neither the Panenka nor the corner camping time play you describe are all that taboo today in soccer.
A remaining strong taboo is to continue playing while a player is injured. Normally if this happens the ref interrupts the game but sometimes they don't notice immediately or want to wait and see if the player will get back up (faking an injury is also somewhat taboo but still frequently done).
The team in possession of the ball is supposed to kick it out in this circumstance. It is a big taboo not to do this. There are even instances where a team that scored while an opponent player was injured apologised and let the opposing team score a goal in return or intentionally scored an own-goal.
I agree that embarrassment is a big part of it. Presumably part of the taboo against the underhand serve is that involves an element of trickery and makes your opponent look stupid.
In general, humiliating your opponent in some way is often seen as bad sportsmanship and may even open you up to "righteous" retribution by your opponent. A "nutmeg" in soccer involves passing the ball through an opposing player's legs. This is usually ok to do once if it brings a genuine advantage but doing this repeatedly to someone is considered taboo in some circles. You can expect the other player to retaliate by fouling you quite severely and some refs might look the other way on that.
It used to happen to me quite a lot when I was a tall, lanky and just not very good defender in our local soccer group. It was very much a family, everyone is welcome kind of thing with a lot of dad-son pairs participating. One of the smaller, nimble teenagers had fun playing the ball through my legs. Naturally, I could not retaliate by fouling a 13 year old... Eventually, his dad took him aside and warned him in very stern words about this behavior, making it clear to him that eventually someone might put him in the hospital over it.
Humiliating your opponent is an interesting explanation of some taboos.
You would not expect players to pick centre a third of the time, simply because shots to the centre are much easier to defend.
This is a big theme in Malcolm Gladwell’s old book on underdogs, “David and Goliath”. He goes through lots of great examples of underdogs exploiting taboos, like in guerrilla warfare, or in war games, even a middle school girls basketball team that decides to full court press on literally every possession—apparently opposing coaches were irate about it.
I’m also reminded of some Freakonomics reporting maybe like 20 years ago arguing that NFL coaches are too risk-averse on fourth down: apparently they punt way more than the odds alone would predict. The going hypothesis is that they’re trying to save their jobs (which is a way of saving face, I guess?), rather than win the game.
This is one of many issues discussed in philosopher David Papineau's book "Knowing The Score". Am I right in thinking that it's still considered underhand in tennis to hit the ball directly at an opponent at the net? There's also the curious expectation that one should always apologise for winning a point with a lucky net-cord - but nobody expects their opponent to apologise if the net-cord bounces backwards.
Mankading, by the way, is the exact cricketing equivalent of the pick-off in baseball.
Good analogy for mankading, as a cricket fan who has been getting into baseball recently the pick-off does seem very similar. The taboo on mankading has been heavily challenged over the last 5 - 10 years, mostly driven by the IPL and T20 cricket which are heavily influenced by baseball. https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/if-you-think-it-doesn-t-fit-into-cricket-change-the-rule-ashwin-on-mankading-1180028
In fact, in 2023 the MCC reaffirmed that mankading is a legal dismissal and challenged batters to stop leaving their crease before the bowler delivers the ball if they don't want to be dismissed. Another notable thing is that the taboo is very strong in Australia, England, NZ, South Africa, but most of the recent mankad dismissals have been performed by Indian and West Indian players.
The taboo has never been particularly strong in these regions (this type of dismissal is named for Vinno Mankad, an Indian captain who controversially did it against Australia in 1947) so I suspect the shifting taboo is most likely due to India now being the dominant force in cricket.
I could look it up but…I wonder if bunting in baseball was taboo at some point? It seems a lot like a tennis drop shot, an underpowered thing that’s hard to counter especially if the defense isn’t expecting it.
According to my 10 second AI query, bunting is taboo when done for a hit to break a no-hitter in the late innings, and when done with a very sizeable lead. If these are true, the latter looks like something to do with humiliating an opponent, the first has to do with some kind of idea that you're not playing to win, you're playing to prevent an achievement by the opposing team.
So fun to think about this stuff! One dimension I didn’t see evaluated was whether some taboos exist more due to the difficulty of writing a clear rule. maybe it is really hard to write an explicit rule forbidding a drop shot without causing unintended shifts to closely related play. it is easier to socially suppress (“you know it when you see it”) than to play whack-a-mole with rulesets.
also - maybe taboos are inevitable and selected for, when it comes to increasing popularity and engagement. social media has shown us that divisiveness increases engagement, and taboo violations provide a very ripe ground for argumentation and deliberation in addition to what written rules provide. it also enhances community, “inside knowledge” and all. so it perhaps isn’t in the best interest of a sporting body to make things too rigid. ✨balance in all things✨, heh
100%. I think this has to be true of some taboos. I just wrote a whole book about rules and discretion here: https://wwnorton.com/books/fewer-rules-better-people. It occurred to me that the "oblique knee kicks" in cage-fighting has to be a version of this. You can't prohibit kicking the calves, or the thigh, these are paradigmatic good fighting strategies. And kicking the side of the knees is right in between them, so you can't formulate such a rule.
i think flops arent considered sissy because its understood that refs will miss genuine fouls so the intention is to gain back what has been lost due to imperfect reffing. i.e. sell the call. its different from the taboos mentioned because it depends on the subjective interpretation of a third party.
From my observation, one of the mechanisms of how the taboos get eroded is the arrival of a new set of players who are unaware of the "unwritten" rules and/or impervious to the sanctions for violating them.
Imagine a spaceship arrived loaded with alien tennis players. The spaceship hovered in orbit, the aliens rode a shuttle down, played their tennis match, then shuttled back up to the ship.
I would expect that they would use underhand serves where it made sense. And if they had success doing so, others would start copying them.
For the aesthetic ones, particularly at the professional level, there may be a Kantian logic that if certain tactics were universally adopted, it would degrade the sport as an entertainment product, so people don't use it.
On example mentioned elsewhere was Malcom Gladwell's discussion of the full court press. It might be fun to see one instance of a team overcoming a much more talented team by deploying a full-court press. But if that emerged as a reliable way to neutralize a talent disparity, it would ruin the appeal of basketball, as people watch basketball to see stars excel, not be thwarted by tactics. And the league would enact written rules (or interpretations of existing rules) to make it less effective, as baseball has done.
In theory, this shouldn't effect lower level play, where commercial appeal isn't a concern. But professional culture obviously impacts the culture elsewhere, and those levels are mode concerned with skill development than wins and losses, so the taboo goes there as well.
Bublik is a player today trying to break the norm. He pisses a lot of people off.
Nice post! Though I wouldn't say that taking the ball to the corner is taboo in football/soccer. It's frustrating for the other team, but it's not considered dirty play. What is taboo is playing on when a player is down injured. See for example the controversy in this game: https://youtu.be/iUAxqig6GQE?si=QVmo_4YLHi1kcAA0.
I remember watching Michael Chang use an underarm serve in at the French Open and it totally changed the momentum of the match. I thought it was amazing.
Surely a very large fraction of sports taboos (unambiguously exemplified by the "granny") lies in the fact that the main foundational function of sports is mate selection in adolescence and young adulthood? Most sport is played to win in a manner that advertises sexually desirable forms of strength, coordination, stamina, perception, cleverness, resilience and (in team sports) communication and other social skills. Apart from the small fraction of sporting activity for which winning directly produces profit, nerdishly optimizing for win rate is a trap.
You can also try to explain it by way of war, as most sports arose in ancient societies to highlight the very skills and physiques had by the most elite warriors.
True, but I think the warrior explanation is almost fully encompassed by the sexual selection explanation, as the capacities required of a good warrior were the primary desirable traits for males in those societies. The rise of less martial sports like baseball or even billiards seems to correlate with a shift in desirable traits as civilization develops, and the rise of women's sports also seems to track my above list of traits becoming increasingly desired in women.
Which is the one where the guy can beat every nutty Mario level that other people design? Seems to anti-select for sex if you ask me.