The High Costa Low Living: Reviewing Swansea vs. Chelsea

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

In Luis Suarez's second season at Liverpool, a pattern of officiating started to emerge. Despite winning numerous fouls with his pace, trickery and direct running, Suarez seemed to be getting fewer decisions than ever before. In almost every fixture, he would end up howling at the referee and throwing his hands to the skies as his claims for a foul were dismissed out of hand, despite the fact that he had just been sent sprawling or raked down his ankle by some lumbering centre-back. Brendan Rodgers claimed that Suarez was being unfairly denied legitimate penalties. It was true, and Suarez had brought it entirely upon himself.

See, in his debut campaign on Merseyside, Suarez had gained something of a reputation. If the Premier League had been known for its gamesmanship, Suarez took things to the next level. When it came to exaggerating contact, Suarez was cunning, brilliant and utterly shameless. He had deceived referees on numerous occasions, and so they compensated by marking him out.

It wasn't just the diving that made Suarez so infamous. He was a spiteful tackler, a niggling presence, and never afraid to needle his opponents off the ball. All in all, his conduct had become so unsportsmanlike that referees appeared to have an unspoken code of conduct towards him. Objective decision making went out of the window, so objectionable was his approach to the game.

In the time since Suarez departed for Barcelona, one man has taken up the mantle of poor sportsmanship. That man is Diego Costa, and he plays football like an absolute dick. He has all of Suarez's worst traits in abundance, with a few more thrown in for good measure. He's also more intelligent than his predecessor, in that he seems to have found a formula for being obnoxious and getting away with it.

In Chelsea's match against Swansea on Sunday, Costa could, and should, have been sent off. He was cautioned in the first half for a robust foul on Leroy Fer, before a litany of minor misdemeanours was topped off with a theatrical dive under pressure from Lukas Fabianski. In the end, he stayed on the pitch, and even nabbed Chelsea an equaliser late on. It's not the first time he could have seen red this season before going on to score a crucial goal, as West Ham and Watford supporters can attest.

That leaves football fans asking the question: exactly how much can Costa can get away with? How long before he gets the full Suarez treatment and suffers from a complete dearth of goodwill from referees? Though refs should, in an ideal world, judge each incident on objective merit, the example of Suarez suggests there's only so much shit they can take. Costa is living dangerously at the moment, and there'd be little sympathy for him were he to come in for a few harsh decisions, or indeed were he to be sent off "for being an arsehole" (in the words of the referee's report) in every match from now until May.