The introduction of the Video Assistant Referee supports the fairness of the game – An analysis of the home advantage in the German Bundesliga
Section snippets
Purpose of the present study
The aim of this study is to examine if the introduction of the VAR changed the decision-making of the referee in the German Bundesliga. Our present paper builds on the latest studies suggesting that the VAR impacts referees’ decisions (e.g., Han et al., 2020; Holder et al., 2021; Lago-Peñas et al., 2021) by providing a larger dataset over several seasons from one specific league. Specifically, our study added the analysis of 2448 games to the previously analysed 3984 games (n = 480, Han et al.,
Data
We mainly retrieved our data from the website football-data.co.uk (https://www.football-data.co.uk), added penalty kicks from transfermarkt.de (https://www.transfermarkt.de) and separated the 2nd yellow cards from the direct red cards, which gives us the opportunity to trace the difference in direct red cards to the implementation of the VAR. Our constructed dataset included all games in the German Bundesliga four seasons before (2013/14–2016/17) and four seasons after (2017/18–2020/21) the
Results
Descriptive statistics of performance and disciplinary sanctions for the home and the away team in the eight seasons from 2013/14 to 2020/21 are presented in Table 1, Table 2.
The t-tests comparing the game outcomes and the referee bias for the home and the away team can be found in Table 3 to Table 5. Table 3 shows that the number of goals scored (t(1223) = 7.00, p < .001, d = 0.20), points (t(1223) = 7.25, p < .001, d = 0.21), and yellow cards (t(1223) = −6.72, p < .001, d = 0.30) indicate the
Discussion
The VAR was introduced to help make soccer a fairer sport. Previous research has pointed out that the referees may favor the home teams by awarding proportionally fewer fouls, yellow cards, and red cards to them (Boyko et al., 2007; Downward & Jones, 2007; Nevill et al., 2002). This referee bias is one of the main driving forces behind the home advantage. However, if the VAR indeed helps to overcome this bias, the home advantage may decline accordingly. The current study provides new
Declaration of competing interest
None.
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