Evaluation of the impact of the video assistant referee technology on home advantage and referee bias in professional football

Abstract

Referees are crucial parts of sports games. Impartial officiating of referees is vital for the sustainability of sports games, and incorrect decisions made by referees have often led to critical implications such as substantial financial losses of teams. Among several factors contributing to erroneous judgments of referees are crowd factors, which are considered the most dominant. It has been suggested that they may influence referees’ decision-making by causing them to subconsciously favor the home side, resulting in home advantage. It is nearly impossible to perfectly control these factors leading to referee bias. Video assistant referee (VAR) was recently adopted in the world of football to add fairness to the world of football. Therefore, we hypothesized that adopting VAR technology would contribute to reducing home advantage by minimizing the influences of various factors on referees’ decision-making. The current study, by measuring home advantage as the difference between the average home and away team goal, discovered that implementing VAR significantly reduces home advantage in professional football leagues.