Are Home Field Advantage and Referee Bias Driven by the Fans? Evidence from Across the Ocean

Bayesian networks for unbiased assessment of referee bias in Association Football

“…However, we found that the home crowd alone is not associated with positive referee bias. It should be acknowledged that there is some evidence that refereeing bias varies from league to league in conjunction with crowd hostility (Anders & Rotthoff, 2012), and caution should therefore be exercised in generalising the findings of the present study to all of world football prior to the application of BN modelling to other major leagues. In order to formulate such a conclusion, one has not only to understand the degree of impact of home crowd on home advantage, but also to measure home advantage for individual teams before assessing referee bias.…”

“…1. We convert the possession rate into time spent (in minutes) holding the ball, and we use the positional statistics of Action Zones 2 and Shot Zones 3 to estimate the time spent respectively at a) opposition third, and subsequently at b) opposition penalty box. Essentially, we are only interested in (b), since there is where the penalties are awarded.…”

“…Irrespective of the true underlying causes, there is no doubt that 'playing at home' has a significant impact on a team's success. This home advantage effect has been extensively studied (Courneya & Carron, 1992;Nevill & Holder, 1999;Hirotsu & Wright, 2003;Pollard & Pollard, 2005;Pollard, 1986;2006;Poulter, 2009;Anders & Rotthoff, 2012;Constantinou & Fenton, 2013). Numerous explanatory factors have been proposed for home advantage.…”

“…The crowd effect is normally suggested as one of the most important factors (Agnew & Carron, 1994;Nevill et al, 1996;2002;Downward & Jones, 2007;Dohmen, 2008;Goumas, 2012) and is said to occur to a greater extent in leagues in which home crowds are more hostile and vociferous (Anders & Rotthoff, 2012). Other proposed factors include the travelling effect (Clarke & Norman, 1995), the familiarity with the playing grounds (Neave & Wolfson, 2003;Pollard, 2006), as well as referees themselves who are said to favour home teams on the basis of penalty kicks, free kicks, yellow/red cards and/or extra time data (Nevill et al, 1996;2002;Sutter & Kocher, 2004;Boyko et al, 2007;Downward & Jones, 2007;Dawson et al, 2007;Dohmen, 2008;Buraimo et al, 2010;Goumas, 2012).…”

Do Fans and Officials Think Alike When Assessing the Home-Field Advantage? Support for Actor–Observer Asymmetry in the National Football League

“…In recent years, much of the research behind the HFA has focused on referees (Mongeon & Longley, 2013;Souchon et al, 2013) who attempt neutrality but are subjected to much pressure by fans, coaches, and players while undertaking a task in which they need to make instant officiating decisions often without recourse. These studies showed time and again (Anders & Rotthoff, 2013;Unkelbach, & Memmert, 2010) that referees fail in their decision making to buffer against the pressure exerted on them and tend to favor unwittingly the home team. The current study utilized the prism of the actor-observer asymmetry (AOA; Jones & Nisbett, 1971), that is, the observation that actors explain their own behavior differently from the way an observer would explain the same behavior.…”