Referees’ home-bias in football disappears without audience: study
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> We can see that referees’ bias towards away sides has completely changed without an audience in stadiums.
> Previously, away sides used to get more yellow cards in all leagues, and they also had an inferior fouls to cards ratio. However, without an audience, the disparity has disappeared, and in fact, the trend has reversed in some leagues.
Um, where is the analysis explaining why these circumstances are concluded to be evidence of differential referee treatment of (identical) behavior by the soccer players rather than identical referee treatment of differential behavior by the soccer players? This seems like an enormous premise that—correct or not—is accepted without a moment’s consideration.
You'd need some objective way to determine if fouls deserved or didn't deserve a yellow card and be able to show that the same fouls were still being committed, but the refs were judging them differently.
Most obvious reason for away teams committing more fouls per booking in an empty stadium is tactical: away teams are often set up to defend more, in a well structured manner, which means the ratio of inconsequential fouls vs cynical fouls to stop the counter attack, massive misjudgements and losses of temper is likely to be higher
This is compatible with the hypothesis that a 'biased' ref is less likely to let a side get away with regular inconsequential fouls when the fans are screaming at him. But it's also conceding the very large role played by tactical approaches which stats suggest have also changed since the pandemic
I think the players are behaving differently. My thought is that the games will appear to be more similar to training ground practices where the opposition are your own teammates, so the sorts of tackles and behaviour the players express will be different as you don't want to risk injuring your own teammates.
Overall i think the quality of football played has improved without crowds although it's not the same experience without the fans.
I think the honest thing to do is to include alternate hypotheses; or at least mention some possible confounding circumstances.
There were many adjustments to VAR heading into the Covid season. I would flag that as confounding factot
Clubs also sometimes are banned from playing in their own stadium, or can’t play there because it is being renovated.
Another idea: look at Inter Milan versus AC Milan or Genoa vs Sampdoria matches. Those clubs share a stadium, so they play their away games in their home stadium and vice versa.
You could also look at players who, after a decade or more at a club, switch clubs and soon thereafter return to their former home stadium to play an away match (yes, yet another confounding factor, and such players are extremely rare in today’s football)
My best shot: blindfold the referees, put them in cars, drive them to random stadiums (of teams they have never refereed and have never seen the inside of - so preferably in a different country)*, put noise-cancelling headphones on them and dress all fans in white shirts.
* or use a different stadium but fill it with more home than away supporters? But then perhaps the home effect relies on it being the home stadium.
[1]https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Larry_Middleman
Appendix 3 (page 497) has detailed specifications on what type of cameras go where in the ground and what they should be pointing at, etc.
https://resources.premierleague.com/premierleague/document/2...
If you Google it, you may find helpful studies like this one https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070403112044.h...
> Boyko studied the number of goals scored by a team at home versus those scored while away, and found that teams scored 1.5 home goals on average, and 1.1 while away.
Players seems like they would have much more of an effect on goals compared to referees. Players can equally be affected by crowds.
It seems very hard to separate the effects so you can show referee bias. The linked page does not show anything that confirms that referees rather than players are affected.
> In addition to affecting the number of goals scored, the away team received more penalties, implying that referees are making calls in favor of the home team, possibly as a result of the influence of the crowd. Some individual referees are more susceptible to these influences than others. In fact, more experienced referees are less biased by the impact of a large audience, which suggests that they may develop a resistance to effects of the crowd.
I am unsure how you would address this what-if issue. It's not a variable that can be measured or controlled easily and the means of measuring that would be up for contention.
Sometimes things aren't as complicated as people make them want to be.
I have a PhD in an area where (a) it's difficult to conduct experiments, and (b) it's often hard or impossible to get data for some variables. No one likes the person who critiques a paper presentation by saying, "you're not controlling for variable x" without providing a reason why it's an omitted variable and how you can proxy for it (if it's not directly available). But you also won't get far if you aren't clear about the limitations of your paper.
The football referee has only one job. To keep the peace. It's a Hobbesian reflection of football's British roots. Good referees only call the fouls that matter and the great referees make fewer fouls matter because that's what the fans deserve.
Imagine if Howard Webb had sent off Nigel de Jong in the 28th minute of the 2010 World Cup Final. Although he's on record as saying it was clearly a red card offense, he didn't see it that way in the moment and a world of fans were treated to a memorable match versus an hour and a half of Spanish tic-a-tok-a against ten players.
Webb had already given four yellows by the twenty eighth minute. Alonso got up. Twenty years earlier it might not have even been a yellow card.
In that game at that moment all that was needed was a yellow card. The game went on and didn’t spiral out of control until after the late winner.
Or to put my opinion in perspective my referee geekery is why I know what Webb said later. At the time the announcers weren’t howling for a red. Neither were the players on the pitch. A yellow kept the peace.
A much better critique of my argument would point out that the Dutch were officially the home team and that history also would have given them a better claim to home team as well.
But the Dutch did end with ten so there’s that. Yet Webb managed to disperse the first eight Dutch yellow cards to eight different Dutch starters. That’s good refereeing...keeping the peace.
I suppose this is different when the game is a 1/38 league match instead of a winner takes all situation. Spectators are disenchanted by combat sport matches being won by technicality - and that kind of outcome is part of those rules!
It’s all about entertainment and exciting competition after all, right?
Webb gave the players the game they wanted as good referees do. He avoided an officiating fiasco like the 2006 final.
Fouls are part of the game. They are not cheating.
The game is won by the number of balls in the back of the nets, not by time of possession or completed passes. As they say, "The ball is round. The game is ninety minutes. Everything else is just theory."
The referee allowed the game to get out of control which is almost as bad as over officiating. But at least it’s impossible to make the argument that Spain won because of bad officiating.
I can sympathise somewhat with the perspective of the Dutch team. It was their third final and they knew they were outmatched by Spain’s tiki-taka. Still even considering that I think their actions on the pitch were disgraceful.
I did always wonder what Cruyff’s opinion of that game was and I managed to find an article from the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/jul/12/world-cup-f...
edit: Who do you think is going to win Champions League this year?
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2021/1/6/22216167/nfl-playoffs...
VAR.
In spain at least it was deployed on the season prior to the covid season (19-20). That 1st season was a trial and many adjustments were made to it which presumably came to full force in the year of covid.
Went to a Florida hockey game. Most of the fans were from Canada. Was an interesting experience.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/WHx5uipGxRojhsFHQKJawpvuTw...
But it leads me to some musing: if we could remove the human element and replace it with infallible decision making AI would it improve the sport? In football they're trying to get there with cameras.
Probably for some sports and for some elements of other sports. I've thought about this in regards to an umpire's strike zone in baseball. If the strike zone were the same every single time, this might tip the scales in one direction (probably batters). Let's say it advantaged offense even moreso, do higher scoring games make better sport, or are they more enjoyable to watch?
I dont know, but personally I've always enjoyed the slightly random element of the strike zone.
Nowadays VAR has been introduced, so referees can finally rectify their decisions, and also hooligan violence is much more under control.
The gist of it is still there though. A mob of hooligans tries to rally their team to be more aggressive, and if the referee intervenes, there is also a threat of violence against him. That's soccer.
We have seen that now, with covid, it loses the appeal without the crowd and the ceremony. It's just like watching a soccer-videogame stream or something, the actual sport is meaningless.
1) The article segues from saying "a home team advantage exists", which is provable via score sheets, to "referees are biased against away teams", which is difficult to prove and needs justification. I think the former premise is better
2) It should be easy to add tests for statistical significance. From eyeballing I'm not sure that they're significant
3) Different rules have been implemented that may account for any significant differences, e.g., VAR, new handball rules
Other than this finding, I wonder if any other artefacts of no-audiences exist. Such as the average number of goals for away teams, penalty taking accuracy.
The fact that referees give more yellow cards to away teams could be explained by, for example, away teams deserving more yellow cards.
Yet another BS observational study that claims casualty.
There's lots of psychological stuff that influences jury decisions, but I have trouble seeing how this specific metric could apply.
It's pretty obvious whom the crowd is there to support.
I am absolutely convinced that this effect resulted in a successful outcome for me.
The team geographically associated with that place is more likely to win and there may be many different variables that impact that, such as familiarity with the stadium helping to give them a playing edge.
There may well be courts where you can predict ahead of time who is likely to win based on skin color, type of case, etc. There probably are trends of that sort.
But to make that prediction, you would need to know more about the court in question and the case in question than "who is from around here and who is visiting".
If the question is really meant to ask "Will audience sentiment impact jury opinion?" that's entirely possible, but may not always be in the direction the audience would like. There will be a lot of factors there that impact if the audience reaction sways the jury or makes them dig their heels in further.