Why Has The Introduction Of Video Technology Gone So Badly In Football?

In 2019 the Premier League
PINC
followed in the footsteps of most other elite football competitions by introducing the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). Players, coaches and fans have long enjoyed a good moan at the referee, but these calls have only intensified in recent years as so much is at stake financially given the increasing inequalities in the English elite game.

Technology offers the opportunity for these bad decisions to be improved upon. It’s easy to criticise officials, but they are forced to make many decisions under intense time pressure, and also social pressure both from players (see the picture above), but also the fans. In many sports, Hawkeye technology has enabled more precise and accurate decision making to occur. Since 2016, VAR has been introduced in football, beginning with trials in MLS in the US, then full implementation both in Australia’s A-League and MLS in 2017. At the same time that MLS introduced it, Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A also brought in the technology. Spain’s La Liga and France’s Ligue 1 followed in 2018, and England’s Premier League was the only of the so-called “Big Five” of elite football leagues not using it.

In 2019, the Premier League introduced VAR, but it’s not all gone quite according to plan. Most Premier League fans now would rather see football played without VAR. The head coach of Champions Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp, pictured below during a recent contentious VAR episode, is a regular critic.

Such interventions as VAR afford an opportunity for social scientists to evaluate their impact. As such, there is a range of academic papers investigating the impact VAR has had. Jochim Spitz and co-authors have a fascinating paper in the Journal of Sport Sciences looking at the accuracy of decisions when VAR is used. They find that accuracy of decisions increases from 92% to 98% once VAR has been used on a decision.

Perhaps perversely, however, it is often this precision that angers fans. It can be any tiny part of a player’s anatomy (even armpits!), and the margin can be tiny. Great and beautiful goals can be chalked off by these fine margins, and fans get frustrated.

It is easy to criticise this response, mocking the fact that fans wanted more precision, and VAR has delivered that. But VAR was introduced to correct “clear and obvious errors” according to official channels. Hair’s breadth offsides are not clear and obvious errors.

Furthermore, VAR has been used to adjudicate on fouls, and handballs, two incidents in football that have long drawn heated discussion amongst fans. Decisions that have a significant amount of ambiguity – was it really a foul? Was that actually handball? Much of the time, even the video angles cannot be conclusive.

Nonetheless, football matches have been played with VAR now for a number of seasons, and hence thousands of football matches around Europe. It offers an opportunity to investigate the extent to which is has impacted outcomes in the game. I recently presented some research I’m involved in which does precisely this. It’s research I’ve been doing at the University of Reading with colleagues at Lancaster University’s Management School, Rob Simmons and Giuseppe Migali.

We collected information on VAR incidents via the text commentaries that ESPN produces for matches on its website (example here). That enables us to know when in a match a VAR incident occurred, and what happened (was the decision on the field overturned or not?). It also gives us loads of other information as it happened in matches – fouls, yellow cards, goals, offsides, and so on.

In our analysis, we ask whether VAR being installed in the stadium had any impact, but also whether VAR having been used influenced play later in the game. We found a complicated picture, but that at the seasonal level, it appears that the installation of VAR in leagues has mitigated home advantage a little. In seasons where VAR was used, there was 0.15 fewer goals for the home team, and fewer yellow cards given to away players.

Economists and psychologists have long proposed that the referee influences matches in favour of the home team, and the evidence does suggest that social pressure plays a role. Perhaps, as VAR affords referees more time to make decisions, the social (and time) pressure is removed, and better decisions that favour the home side less are made.

However, when we looked in more depth at the impact of VAR in-match, things were less clear. After a VAR incident in a match that has gone against them, a home team appears to be significantly more likely to score a goal, whereas a visiting teams appears to be less likely to score if a VAR incident has gone against them. And there’s no clear effect, in-match, of VAR incidents on fouls or yellow cards.

Nonetheless, for all the complex econometric work that could be done on VAR decisions, it remains that it is the fan response that matters most. How do they feel? Sure, lots of big names are unhappy about it, vocally so. But many others may well not be. Can we measure just how positive or negative fan reactions are?

In our work, we look at match reports written by a popular football website in Germany, Kicker.de. Our reasoning is that journalists must write match reports to appeal to their customers, and hence if their customers do not like VAR, then match reports where VAR was used ought to be less positive.

We use natural language processing to calculate the sentiment of the text of match reports, but we find that although reports are more negative with each extra VAR incident, this isn’t a significant effect – it could just as easily go the other way.

Kicker also reports a referee grade though for each match – a rating of how well the referee did. Could it be that in these scores fan sentiment towards referees is more acutely reflected? Referees get a score between 1 and 6, and 2 is the most common score (1.5 and 2.5 is possible), and 1 is the best possible score.

For every VAR incident in a match, the referee grade increases by 0.2. That is, referees are scored more negatively for every VAR incident that takes place. So there is also evidence regarding the negative fan reaction to VAR.

Can anything be done? Can VAR be rescued? Surely it can. For all its traditionalists, football is always moving with the times, and it’s unlikely that football will dispose of video technology, especially when it’s generally regarded to work so well in other sports, like tennis, cricket and rugby. But can things be learnt from these sports? In some of those sports, players and teams get challenges, rather than the automatic referral that goes on with VAR. In others, there’s clearer information on what’s going on, with better commentary from officials about why decisions are being made.