Does the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) mitigate referee bias on professional football?
Thadeu Gasparetto and
Kirill Loktionov
PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-11
Abstract:
The purpose of the paper is to check whether the introduction of the VAR system mitigated the referee bias against away teams. The dataset comprises 2279 matches played in the first tier of the Brazilian League from 2016 to 2021. We analyze 6 seasons of the first tier of the Brazilian domestic football league– 3 seasons before and 3 seasons after the introduction of the VAR technology. Potential bias is viewed through the lens of yellow cards, red cards and number of penalties awarded for both home and away clubs. A paired t-test is used to reveal potential statistical differences between pre-VAR and post-VAR periods, followed by Ordinary Least Squares regressions to inspect whether certain referee’ categories have changed their behavior after the implementation of this technology. Our empirical findings offer evidence that the referee bias is diminished, but still present.
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294507 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 94507&type=printable (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0294507
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294507
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().