Brazil's forward Neymar reacts in pain following a tackle by Cameroon's midfielder Joel Matip. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images


One of the most common complaints during this otherwise splendid World Cup is the amount of time players spend embellishing injuries.

All too often during matches, seemingly fit men fall to the ground in agony. They scream, wince, pound the grass with their fists and gesture to the sidelines for a stretcher. Some of them clutch a limb as if it was just freed from the jaws of a wood chipper.

But after a few moments, just as the priests arrive to administer last rites, they sit up on the gurney, shake it off, rise to their feet and run back on the field to play some more.

Fans of the world's most popular game know that this is just one of soccer's oldest and most universally despised tactics. Turning a small foul into a death performance worthy of La Scala can draw cards for opposing players, kill time from the clock or just give one's winded teammates a breather. What's interesting about the World Cup is that not all national teams are the same. Some embellish all the time, some hardly at all. (Explore team profiles and key players to watch.)






See how Jurgen Klinsmann has transformed Team USA's play.



With this in mind, the Count loaded 32 World Cup matches on the DVR and set out to perform a comprehensive empirical study aimed at determining one thing: Which World Cup participant nation is the world's floppiest?

During the first 32 games, there were 302 players who could be seen at some point rolling around in pain, crumpling into a fetal position or lying lifeless on the pitch as the referee stopped the match. These theatrical episodes ate up a total of 132 minutes of clock, a metric we have decided to call "writhing time."

To be fair, it is actually possible to get hurt playing soccer. You can clang heads. You can snap a hamstring. You can get spiked in the soft tissue. There were nine injuries in total that forced players to be substituted from the game and to miss, or potentially miss, a match. These were discarded. That left 293 cases of potential embellishment that collectively took up 118 minutes, 21 seconds.

Another trick: how to calculate writhing time. The criteria used here is the moment the whistle is blown (because of a potential injury) to the moment that player stands up. If the TV camera cut to a replay, the stand-up moment was estimated. If he was helped off the field, the "writhing" clock stopped when he crossed the sidelines.

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 "injuries" and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 "injuries" and almost four times as much writhing.

So with that cleared away, here are the "winners" of our first-ever international soccer injury-embellishment awards. Envelopes, please!

The Team Most Commonly Seen in Anguish: Brazil. There were 17 incidents in two games when a member of the Seleção was seen on the ground in pain—the most of any country. World Cup poster boy Neymar had five such "injuries," the most on his team. In every case (except friday´s july 4th grave injury) he was back on his feet within 15 seconds.

The Overall Writhing-Time Champions: Honduras. Los Catrachos spent the most time on the ground or being tended to by trainers: seven minutes and 40 seconds to be exact. Naturally, five minutes and 10 seconds of that came in the first half against France when the match was tied (which would have been good enough for them).

The Team Most Likely to Grin and Bear it: Bosnia and Herzegovina. These World Cup newbies obviously don't get how this works. They only had two "injuries" in two games for a total of 24 seconds of writhing time.

The Team With the Most Carnage in One Game: Chile. While they protected an early lead against Spain, the Chileans tallied 11 "injuries," more than 24 other teams had in two games.

The Fastest "Injury" Yet: Enner Valencia, Ecuador. Against Honduras, Valencia was on the ground, clutching his leg after four seconds.

Worst Use of a Stretcher: 5 players (tie). Of the nine players carried off in these matches, five returned—all in less than 90 seconds, including American DaMarcus Beasley.