Do nets actually work on human beings?

Let me start this by clarifying that I'm not talking about gigantic nets. I totally understand that I could be entrapped in a fishing net with a few dozen tuna whether I want to or not. I'm talking normal sized nets that one human being could reasonably throw onto another human.

I've been watching a lot of gladiator films/TV shows with the boys. In the "Spartacus" television show, gladiators frequently use nets as a way to attack other gladiators. I'm pretty sure that this attack was also used in the film "Gladiator", but definitely not by any of the good fighters like Maximus or Commodus.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Every time it's shown in one of these programs, the guy getting "captured" by the net is clearly acting like he's in trouble instead of simply removing the net, which takes like two seconds. The "victim" can also run away from the attacker while removing the net. The nets could also very easily be knocked to the ground via sword, axe, club, trident, etc... It seems like every gladiator that is taking a net into battle is just wasting 50% of his arms.

Were nets ever actually used in history in human-to-human combat? In the aforementioned "Spartacus" show, there's a dude that sucks in combat with a sword, so the black guy that runs shite tells him that he needs to train with a trident and net. Was he being serious in saying "this is the best chance you have", or was he just basically giving him a rubber duck and trident to fight with because he knows that nets are retarded and he wanted the guy to die?

Also, all of this applies to late 19th century European explorers in Africa with the gigantic butterfly nets trying to catch protagonists/children/anything but butterflies. Cartoons made these people out to be dastardly foes, but what can they do to a human being that they capture with the net? Any kind of struggle will make capture impossible.