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      Twelve eyes see more than eight. Referee bias and the introduction of additional assistant referees in soccer

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          Abstract

          This study is the first to investigate whether the introduction of additional assistant referees in the UEFA Europa League (2009–2010 season) and the UEFA Champions League (2010–2011 season) was associated with lower referee bias in terms of home and “big” team favouritism. To this end, we analyse a unique database with pre- and within-game characteristics of all games in seven recent seasons in these leagues by means of bivariate probit regression models. We find evidence for substantial referee bias before the introduction of additional referees, while no such evidence is found after the introduction. Furthermore, additional assistants go hand in hand with more yellow cards for both home and away teams. We show that these findings are robust to multiple operationalisations of referee bias and that they are not just picking up a general time evolution towards less referee bias or the effect of parallel reforms.

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          Most cited references39

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          Favoritism Under Social Pressure

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            Referee bias contributes to home advantage in English Premiership football.

            Officiating bias is thought to contribute to home advantage. Recent research has shown that sports with subjective officiating tend to experience greater home advantage and that referees' decisions can be influenced by crowd noise, but little work has been done to examine whether individual referees vary in their home bias or whether biased decisions contribute to overall home advantage. We develop an ordinal regression model to determine whether various measures of home advantage are affected by the official for the match and by crowd size while controlling for team ability. We examine 5244 English Premier League (EPL) match results involving 50 referees and find that home bias differs between referees. Individual referees give significantly different levels of home advantage, measured as goal differential between the home and away teams, although the significance of this result depends on one referee with a particularly high home advantage (an outlier). Referees vary significantly and robustly in their yellow card and penalty differentials even excluding the outlier. These results confirm that referees are responsible for some of the observed home advantage in the EPL and suggest that home advantage is dependent on the subjective decisions of referees that vary between individuals. We hypothesize that individual referees respond differently to factors such as crowd noise and suggest further research looking at referees' psychological and behavioural responses to biased crowds.
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              Favoritism of agents – The case of referees' home bias

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                26 February 2020
                2020
                : 15
                : 2
                : e0227758
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Esch-sur-Alzette/Belval, Luxembourg
                [2 ] Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
                [3 ] IZA, Bonn, Germany
                [4 ] GLO, Maastricht, Netherlands
                [5 ] Research Foundation–Flanders, Brussels, Belgium
                [6 ] University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
                [7 ] Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium
                [8 ] IMISCOE, Rotterdam, Netherlands
                Queen Mary University of London, UNITED KINGDOM
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1660-5165
                Article
                PONE-D-19-03312
                10.1371/journal.pone.0227758
                7043735
                32101548
                3b888a39-2f0f-4a72-94eb-b591f0c2cced
                © 2020 Albanese et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 5 February 2019
                : 28 December 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 3, Pages: 15
                Funding
                The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
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