The impact of team preferences on soccer offside judgments in laypersons: a quasi-experimental study

Abstract

The present study uses a quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of team preferences on the accuracy of offside judgments. In Experiments 1 and 2, supporters of two German soccer clubs (i.e., Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04) judged offsides in artificial scenes from a match between the clubs. We expected that supporters of both clubs would less frequently report the offside position of a forward from the preferred team. The results of Experiment 1 partly confirmed the predictions. Both groups reported the offside position of a yellow forward less frequently than that of a blue forward, and this effect was much larger for supporters of Borussia Dortmund than for supporters of Schalke 04. The difference between groups could be attributed to team preferences. The weaker effect of team preference in supporters of Schalke 04 was attributed to an unexpected perceptual effect that increased the accuracy of offside judgments for blue forwards in both groups. Experiments 2 and 3 showed the presumed effect of team preferences and the perceptual effect, respectively, in isolation. In summary, the results of our experiments provide evidence for (a) an effect of team preferences and (b) an effect of shirt–background contrast on offside judgments in soccer.

A color-related bias in offside judgments in professional soccer: A matter of figure-background contrast?

“…The present study tested the hypothesis that different shirt colors, which are presumably associated with different figure-background contrast, affect the number of offside judgments against a particular team. In a previous laboratory study, Wühr et al [ 10 ] observed more offside judgments for forwards wearing the outfit of Schalke 04 (blue shirts, white shorts) than for forwards wearing the outfit of Borussia Dortmund (yellow shirts, black shorts), when the figure-background luminance contrast was higher for Schalke 04 than for Borussia Dortmund. Here, we asked whether a similar pattern would occur in real matches of the German Bundesliga.…”

“…Because attention is biased towards higher-contrast stimuli (e.g., [ 16 , 17 ]), ARs will more often “find” the higher-contrast player (in a blue shirt) than the lower-contrast player (in a yellow shirt), and therefore the bias would increase offside judgments against Schalke 04, and decrease offside judgments against Borussia Dortmund. Of course, this account must be taken with caution because we have not measured figure-background contrast in the matches included in our studies, but we know that higher figure-background contrast can increase the number of offside decisions against the more salient team from previous laboratory studies ([ 10 ]). Hence, we can provide indirect empirical evidence for our account.…”

“…In a recent study, Wühr, Fasold, and Memmert [ 10 ], investigated the possible impact of team preferences on (errors in) offside judgments in laypersons. Therefore, these authors analyzed and compared performance of two groups of participants when judging offside in (static) displays showing offside or non-offside situations in a “match” between Borussia Dortmund and F.C.…”

“…In their Experiment 2, Wühr et al [ 10 ] used displays in which the luminance contrast between figure(s) and background was equated for the two teams, to isolate the effect of team preferences. Results showed more missed offside positions for the preferred team, supporting the predictions, and the interpretation of the results of Experiment 1.…”

“…Thus, stimuli of higher contrast have a higher probability of being inspected first than stimuli of lower contrast (e.g., [ 16 , 17 ]). This attentional bias may have contributed to the observation of more offside judgments for players of Schalke 04 (higher contrast) as compared to players of Borussia Dortmund (lower contrast) in the Wühr et al [ 10 ] study. A reasonable heuristic for detecting offside positions is to search for the player—among those players that are near the offside line—that is closest to the goal under attack.…”