Eindhoven’s Otman fifa 14 coins ultimate team

When Suárez first bit an opponent, PSV Eindhoven’s Otman  Bakkal, he was banned for seven matches; last year he was suspended for 10 matches for biting Branislav Ivanovic; now he has been banned for nine competitive internationals and four months, a total of 21 games, for biting Giorgio Chiellini. It appeals to our sense of fairness that an offender is punished more harshly each time he repeats his offence, and the most recent ban has been widely welcomed outside Uruguay. At some point, and we may be there already, a punishment will be so severe the player is forced to change his ways.

The same principle is used elsewhere in the game a player who collects five bookings in a season will get a one-match suspension, but anyone who collects another five will sit out two games and those reaching 15 cautions will miss three. Outside sport, from driving bans to prison sentences, each sanction is more severe than the last. But in the very great majority of cases those who dive to influence football matches never risk any more than a booking and often evade even that. Not once in a long career marked by brilliant wing-play and regular cheating has Robben been suspended for his fakery. Fifa this week insisted that repeated and self-confessed simulation did "not fulfil" their criteria for retrospective action, and a spokesperson limply said the best they could do was to "strongly appeal to participants to uphold the principles of fair play".

It is out of step with their own recently-applied definition of justice and no kind of deterrent for an offence described by one Fifa vice-president, Northern Ireland’s Jim Boyce, as "a cancer within the game". Some associations, including Scotland’s, already hand out retrospective bans for simulation. Two years ago the English FA saw an attempt to bring in a similar rule voted down by a combination of the Premier League, the Football League and the elite referees. But Robben’s diving is on a different scale as Fifa established with the Suárez ban, whose severity they explained by saying that "such behaviour cannot be tolerated on any football pitch, and in particular not at a Fifa World  Cup when the eyes of millions of people are on the stars on the field".