“Soccer is not a sport for ballerinas,” the Italian Claudio Gentile said some 20 years ago. Gentile was seeking to justify his own reputation as a roughhouse defender given to clattering tackles, but his words embrace a heavy truth about the sport.

The spirit of machismo hangs heavily over soccer. The idea of red-blooded he-men knocking one another about on the soccer field evidently has a deep attraction for the sport’s devotees, and it is clearly a crucial part of the game – even in Brazil, the home of Pele’s Beautiful Game. Just last week, Brazil’s coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, talking of the upcoming World Cup qualifier against Uruguay, had this to say about midfielder Emerson: “A player such as Emerson, with weight and strength, is very useful. And you need to be a real man to impose yourself in Montevideo.”

Things can hardly be otherwise in a contact sport, but soccer also features a high level of refined – at times almost delicate – artistry. The rules of the game are supposed to ensure that a balance exists between the two elements, to prevent physical play from crushing creativity.

Maintaining that balance is a tricky business, largely because the sport promotes itself as an arena for tough guys, rather than for skillful artists. The struggle between the two poles can be seen at its clearest in the ongoing attempts by FIFA to stamp out diving.

Reacting to what it saw as an increasing tendency to dive, FIFA altered the rules in 1999 and classified diving as “unsporting behavior” – which meant that referees were obliged to give a yellow card to any player they suspected of diving. Periodic reminders to referees have followed, but the practice persists. Manchester United’s Roy Keane complained about it last week: “Players are going to ground far too easily and it seems to be getting worse.”

Is it? Or is it simply that everyone has been made so aware of diving that they see it everywhere they look? Referees in particular are wary of being conned by diving attackers, and not infrequently call a dive where they should be calling a foul by the defender.

A classic example of referee misjudgment came in the 2002 World Cup, when the Brazilian Ronaldinho – the epitome of the soccer artist – was confronted by the Chinese defender Du Wei. After Ronaldinho had exquisitely played the ball through Du Wei’s legs, the Chinese defender reached out, grabbed Ronaldinho’s shirt, and pulled him down. It was a flagrant foul, and as referee Anders Frisk raced up holding his yellow card, the television guys immediately posted a graphic showing that Du Wei had been cautioned. That had to be quickly replaced as Frisk in explicably, ludicrously, cautioned Ronaldinho for diving.

Frisk’s absurd decision to ignore the defender’s foul and punish what he evidently saw as an exaggerated fall by Ronaldinho reflected soccer’s strong tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to defenders. It is that attitude – the pro-machismo approach – that lies at the root of soccer’s problem with diving.

Three years ago, a 17-year-old youngster called Robinho began to draw rave notices in Brazil for his sparkling play and superb dribbling skills. He played for Santos, Pele’s old club, so Robinho was often likened to the master himself. After Robinho had put on a mesmerizing performance against Gremio in 2002, the Gremio goalkeeper Danrlei accused him of being “anti-soccer” and warned, “Players get angry when they get dribbled all the time. He could end up having his leg broken.”

The comment raised a mild wave of protests, but it could not be dismissed as merely Danrlei’s personal view. Earlier that same year, a Brazilian referee had cautioned a player for feinting and dribbling, claiming that he was provoking opponents and risking injury.

These are extreme examples, but they dramatize the sport’s willingness to excuse the excesses of defenders. It ought to be unthinkable that a player would openly discuss the possibility of a skillful opponent getting his leg broken, but Danrlei had no hesitation in voicing his views.

So what are the ball artists of soccer to do? Will they get protection from referees or not? FIFA would claim that it has tried to ensure this, particularly with its much-trumpeted ban on tackling from behind. But this is a ban in name only: Every game still features such tackles, and the mandatory red card is rarely produced.

Every attempt is made to minimize the effects of the so-called ban. “Well, the tackle wasn’t really from behind, more from the side, maybe the tackler actually got a piece of the ball before he clobbered his opponent, and you have to allow for the wet, slippery field.” And so on.

So the crunching tackling goes on unpunished. Many of those tackles are flagrant, cynical fouls, where the defender deliberately knocks his opponent down to snuff out a possible danger. The predictable response of many attacking players is to resort to diving as a defense mechanism. If they don’t get the calls they should get, then maybe they can engineer a few calls that they don’t deserve.

It’s reprehensible, of course. Everyone agrees that players should not tumble theatrically to the ground after being tackled, faking an injury, hoping to draw a foul or a penalty kick, maybe even getting their opponent ejected from the game.

Diving is a pernicious practice, an attempt to con the referee, a form of cheating, and it has to be mercilessly dealt with. But is it any more cheating than what the defenders are doing, which also clearly comes under the heading of breaking the rules to secure an advantage?

One must also point out that there is an impressive list of top attacking players – including Diego Maradona, Juninho, and Marco van Basten – who have suffered horrendous injuries as a result of tackles from behind. I have yet to hear of a defender being injured by a diving player.

I am not mounting a defense of diving. It needs to be banished from the game. But so does dangerous, cynical fouling. That is where the problems begin, and that is where FIFA should act – to ensure the sport’s precarious balance by making quite certain that referees are every bit as harsh with cheating defenders as they are with divers.