Would you be surprised to learn – without wishing to leave José Mourinho in another froth of outrage – there are various files at Premier League headquarters that show Chelsea have the worst record in the top division when it comes to arguing about refereeing decisions and trying to influence match officials?

A team of delegates marks each club every week for the Premier League’s fair-play league and Mourinho’s players currently score the lowest in the respect-to-referees column. Points are lost for repeatedly disputing decisions, badgering officials and any other examples of broken-down professionalism. Liverpool are top, followed by Burnley and West Brom. Chelsea are last and only marginally better, 19th out of 20 clubs, in the category that assesses the behaviour of managers.

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Mourinho and his assistants – one of whom, Rui Faria, appears to go by the theory that the smaller the pip the louder the squeak – have been deducted so many points there is only the Sunderland manager, Gus Poyet, and his own attack dog, Mauricio Taricco, who have outdone them aggro‑wise. Last season Chelsea had the joint worst record with Southampton and Mauricio Pocchetino, followed by Stoke City and Mark Hughes. This season Mourinho has put up one heck of a fight but Poyet has broken free and Sunderland have replaced Chelsea as the worst offenders.

It’s certainly not just Chelsea who occasionally give the impression their tactics derive from Stephen Potter’s old book Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Mourinho’s team are 10th in the fair-play league when the other points are totted up and have played a game fewer than most teams. Principally, those marks are from the number of yellow and red cards, but points are also awarded for “positive play”, or deducted for lack for it, and that is the category that encompasses diving and time-wasting.

Chelsea might have brought Graeme Souness to the point of spontaneous combustion the other night but, on average, there are three other teams – West Ham, Manchester City and Arsenal – who receive higher marks per game on that front. As for the overall table, Chelsea are a couple of places ahead of Arsenal. West Ham are top, followed by Liverpool and Burnley, and there is prize money apparently for whoever finishes in that position at the end of the season. It is just a pity, perhaps, that the league do not have a fines system in place for the bottom three – currently Sunderland, Aston Villa and Hull.

Was Souness right with his attack on the sport’s con artists? Broadly so, yes, and it is easy to understand his revulsion when it seems to be the norm for so many players to think that influencing or deceiving the referee is just another skill or tactic. It’s everywhere these days, and that includes the school playing fields. I watched a match recently that featured the tragicomedy of nine-year-olds putting on displays of pretend agony, adding an extra roll to their tumbles and shooting plaintive looks, Ronaldo-style, to the referee. They are just copying what they see on television, presumably, but Souness did fall into the familiar old trap when he concluded it was “not the British way”. Not once, perhaps. But here’s a question: who is the only player apart from Diego Costa to be booked twice for diving this season? The answer: Danny Ings, born in Hythe, now of Burnley.

Is it getting worse? Well, it is certainly intriguing to learn that referees are trained these days to look for tell-tale signs such as the angle of the player’s arms when they fall. Someone who goes down genuinely will automatically put his hands down to protect himself. A diver tends to put his arms forwards or up.

The modern-day player is, however, becoming better at it, judging by a passage in Luis Suárez’s book about the penalty Daniel Sturridge won when Liverpool beat Manchester United at Old Trafford last season. “He threw himself down,” Suárez recalls. “It was such a good dive even I thought it was a penalty. But then I saw how annoyed Nemanja Vidic was. When I saw the replay I realised Daniel was about a metre away from Vidic. I said to Daniel later: ‘Can you imagine what would have happened if that had been me?’ He said: ‘I felt him touch me,’ and started laughing.”

Let’s not get too hysterical, though. There had been 18 bookings for simulation before this weekend, which is 1.7% of the total number of yellow cards, 1,044, and only one more than the corresponding stage last season, when the year-on-year figures had gone down.

The more alarming shift in pattern is when we assess the number of incidents of players swarming around referees and the kind of coordinated attempt we saw from Chelsea to get Zlatan Ibrahimovic sent off. At this stage last season the Football Association had charged six clubs, from the Premier League down to the Conference National, for failing to control their players this way. That has shot up this season to 16, which is still a tiny percentage of all the games played but a sharp enough increase for the FA to write to every club in those five divisions.

Uefa does not have such a rule and the quicker it puts one in the better because what we have now gives the more calculated teams carte blanche to try to besiege and brainwash the man with the whistle. To reiterate, this is not only Chelsea. Gary Neville, England’s assistant manager, described what happened against Paris Saint-Germain as “shrewd”.

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Indeed, one of the complaints from Roy Hodgson’s coaching staff when England went out of the World Cup was that Uruguay’s captain, Diego Godín, jutted out an arm to block off Sturridge when he was already on a yellow card and only Wayne Rooney went to the referee to campaign for a second booking. Rooney’s view was that England were “too honest” and, though you might not warm to that way of thinking, it is easy to understand his point, whether you like it or not. Every successful football team needs a streetwise edge.

Speaking of which, keep an eye on Cesc Fàbregas over the next couple of matches. His nine yellow cards have brought him to the brink of a two-match suspension and it might not be a bad thing for Chelsea if he took a strategic hit rather than risk missing the back-to-back assignments against Manchester United and Arsenal next month. At the very least, we can be sure it will have been discussed and if anyone thinks that is an unfair slight on the player I could happily take them back over Fàbregas’s part in that red card for Ibrahimovic. Fàbregas was merely one-ninth of the gang demanding a sending-off. He was the only one, however, waving an imaginary red card. Job done, his hand came down and suddenly it was sympathy, not outrage, on his face as he went over to Ibrahimovic, full of faux comradeship.

Why, you might ask, should such a brilliantly gifted footballer resort to a sneak’s tricks? Yet why would he be any different? The current Ballon d’Or winner was once regarded as the most prolific diver in English football. The most expensive player in the league showed he could be tripped by thin air. England’s captain has form. The reigning footballer of the year was an expert in all forms of rule-bending and the team at the top of the league can account for four of the 18 bookings for diving.

Mourinho? Imagine playing pool against him. Every time there was a pot on, he would think about rolling up for a snooker. Every time it was your shot, he would be stood over the pocket, waiting for your cue to go back. You would know, every time, he was about to cough. Invariably, it would end one way: him sinking the black.

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Tony Pulis and various others want a video panel to be established to punish the cheats and in extreme cases – for example, Fernando Forestieri’s abysmal pretence during Watford’s game at Wolves last Saturday that Bakary Sako had struck him in the face – it surely warrants stronger action and disciplinary charges. The problem otherwise is that simulation is a yellow-card offence. The FA takes retrospective action only for red-card issues and even if that was changed – and there are zero signs it will be – let’s not pretend it will stop Chelsea and others from adopting the Stephen Potter theory. “Gamesmanship,” he wrote, was “a civilised art as old as the competitive spirit in man.”

Price drop delay just not the ticket

Waiting for ticket prices to start coming down in the tills-ringing Premier League has started to feel like wondering when all this new material from the Stone Roses is ever going to arrive. It is on the way, apparently, but nobody knows when, whether the relevant people are genuine about it, or if we are just being taken for a ride.

Let’s hope not, but it does make you wonder whether the message is getting through when, to cite just one example, Newcastle’s game at Liverpool has been switched by television to a Monday night and the away supporters are being charged £52 each.

The Football Supporters’ Federation is arranging a demonstration in London on 26 March to coincide with the next meeting of the Premier League shareholders. It could do with your support.

Player of the almost-a-year

Is the Professional Footballers’ Association and its extravagantly overpaid chief executive, Gordon Taylor, really still incapable of coming up with a better way for its members to vote for the player of the year other than a ballot that starts two months early?

It seems to be beyond them given that the process has already started but it does slightly devalue the award when Chelsea, for instance, have 11 league games to play and the vote covers little more than the first two-thirds of the season.

My choice would be Branislav Ivanovic, Harry Kane or David de Gea but any of them could lose their form during the run-in or someone else might emerge as a more deserving winner. The award will be announced on 26 April. Yet the Premier League runs until 24 May followed by the FA Cup final the following weekend. So what’s the rush?