EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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4237. Analysis of Perception Differences in Football Video Refereeing

Invited abstract in session WA-16: Fairness in sports, stream OR in Sports.

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 19 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Cristian Dobre
Econometric and Operations Resreach, Tilburg University

Abstract

The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) is introduced in football to guarantee consistency and accuracy in the appliance of the official playing rules. The VAR must avoid appraisals that are prone to interpretability, and must ensure fair play. However, as with every subjective judgment procedure, differences in perception might arise.
This work has gathered statistical evidence that even with use of the VAR, conclusions on the same game situations will still differ among more referees judging it behind the VAR screens. This was achieved by studying the performance of the Dutch football referees who are asked to judge game situations based on video replays. For all game situations, the referees are requested to classify the violation of the fouls rules into 11 ordered categories (from 0 = no violation of the rules up to 10 = strict violation of the rules resulting in a red card). The discrete scores given by the referees are transformed into continuous scores, as required by the Analysis of Variance models, using linear optimization techniques. The statistical methods show enough evidence that there is difference in perception between several referees. Subsequently, groups are formed such that each group contains referees that have similar perception for more uniformity in decision making.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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