Whether Arjen Robben’s tumble as Holland’s game against Mexico stumbled into stoppage time was prompted by actual physical contact or mere desperation, there could be no disputing its theatricality, or that the Dutch winger has something of a track record here.

“He is great player, but he was diving all the time,” said Noé Pamarot, then of Tottenham, in January 2005, after Spurs fell to a 2-0 defeat to Robben’s then club, Chelsea, at White Hart Lane. “Robben is a great player and as well a very good diver,” said Arsène Wenger, after Arsenal’s 1-1 Champions League draw at Bayern Munich earlier this year. For a decade Robben has tumbling and his opponents have been singing the same mournful tune, and still he remains free to flop.

This is not even the first World Cup in which Robben’s proclivity for a plunge has caused controversy – in the last one he dived over the sliding Michel Bastos to win the free-kick from which Holland (indirectly) scored an equaliser in what became a 2-1 quarter-final win over Brazil. This year it was Mexico’s Rafael Márquez, with more immediate match-winning consequences. On Saturday he will take his fearsome repertoire of tricks, flicks, sprints, feints and preposterous pratfalls into a quarter-final against Costa Rica.

Not all of his dives are successful. In 2011 he was booked for attempting to win a penalty for Bayern Munich against Bochum in a German cup tie. “I was stupid,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t do things like that, and I apologise.” Then, this weekend, when asked on Dutch television about his performance against Mexico: “I have to admit there was an incident in the first half where I did dive,” he said. “I must apologise. I should not be doing that.”

So many words, so little action. Diving is wrong, Robben knows it’s wrong and yet he keeps doing it. As it happens, precisely the same is true of this World Cup’s other celebrated repeat offender. It is illogical and impossible to compare the offences of diving and biting, but most would agree that both are broadly bad things that should be punished. So far, only one of them truly has been.

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”.

For anyone concerned primarily with protecting the purity of the sport, simulation has to be of the utmost concern. Suárez, who is far more prone to a penalty-area plummet than he is to on-field feasting, has influenced the results of many more matches by diving than he has by unscheduled snacking (he has a one-in-three bite-to-victory conversion ratio), but by the end of this year will have sat out 38 matches for one offence and none at all for the other.

“Players are always trying to cheat,” the Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini said earlier this year, “because football is cheating.” If Fifa aren’t happy with that definition, it is time they did something about it.