The Psychological and Performance Demands of Association Football Refereeing

Transcription

1 Int. J. Sport Psychol., 2006; 37: The Psychological and Performance Demands of Association Football Refereeing DUNCAN MASCARENHAS*, DAVID O HARE** and HENNING PLESSNER*** * North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, Wrexham, UK ** Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand *** University of Heidelberg, Institute of Psychology, Heidelberg, Germany Traditionally, sports officials have only received a modicum of attention in sport science research literature. Perhaps more surprisingly, only recently have researchers begun to investigate key aspects of refereeing performance such as making judgments, communication behaviors and decision-making training interventions. With this in mind, we have reviewed the available empirical research into football officiating performance and where necessary drawn upon other research and applied programs of investigation in other sports. This paper is structured around the following key elements of referee performance; (1) judgment of offside; (2) judgment of fouls and misconduct; (3) control of game procedures; (4) management of the game and refereeing style; and (5) training complex high-performance skills that could be applied to the development of football refereeing. We highlight some of the demands of football refereeing, review the important findings and, with increasing interest in this area, provide suggestions to stimulate further research. KEY WORDS: Referees, Judgment, Decision making, Training. Introduction Football referees are subject to numerous demands. At the top level pressures to perform come from players, coaches, spectators, the national press, and from their own referee national governing bodies (NGBs). Referees who do not perform well are under such scrutiny that they risk public humiliation on the television and in the daily newspapers or even demotion by their NGB (Weaver, 2001; Wilson, 2000). Rugby league, rugby union and For correspondence: Dr Duncan Mascarenhas, Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences, North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, Plas Coch Campus, Mold Road, Wrexham LL11 2AW, United Kingdom, d.mascarenhas@newi.ac.uk 99

2 American football have adapted to the increased media attention by using video replays to assist the match referee, whereas football has taken a more conservative approach towards the use of technology to assist referees. FIFA have trialed chip-in-the-ball technology to assist with ball-over-the-line decisions (e.g., testing at the U17 world cup, see Gerhaeuser, 2005), although recent trials have not been regarded as satisfactory and the use of digital cameras on the goal posts is now being proposed as an alternative. The global reach of football at the highest levels (e.g., FIFA World Cup and UEFA Champions League) has led to significant investment in the selection, training, preparation and assessment of elite and international referees over the past two decades or so. At grassroots level, where the vast majority of football referees perform, practices vary considerably from country to country and even within the same country. A referee s progression from lower leagues to national levels is generally determined by fitness assessments, match performance evaluations and tests based on knowledge of the Laws of the Game (FIFA, 2004). Fitness requirements are set by FIFA for international qualifications but are varied by NGBs for local qualifications. Such physical demands of football refereeing have been investigated by a number of researchers (e.g., Catterall, Reilly, Atkinson, and Coldwells, 1993; Krustrup and Bangsbo, 2001) and provide essential scientific information for setting physical testing standards and training requirements, however, such papers are beyond the scope of this present review as we are more concerned with the psychological demands of refereeing. Experienced former officials often perform match assessments. At elite levels assessments are made of every match performance but the frequency of assessments diminishes at lower levels of refereeing. At local levels, assessments can be quite infrequent and dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the assessor who may, or may not, have a list of competencies or performance indicators to guide the assessment. Furthermore, there is no uniformity in the evaluation systems that NGBs adopt and referee conferences regularly discuss ways of effectively evaluating referee performance as they feel that their own systems are not always reliable (Sabatini, 2002). When referee assessments are more systematic, they may become overly structured into a long list of competencies (e.g., Griffiths, Dickinson & Renton, 1999) such that it diminishes the task into a skeleton of itself (Lyle, 1999). Tests of declarative knowledge based on the Laws of the Game (FIFA, 2004) provide the basic assessment and training tools for referees. In the past, this has been blackboard instruction and pencil-and-paper testing (Melrose, 2003), although increasing use is being made of more ecologically 100

3 valid video/dvd-based materials, particularly at the top level. The advent of full time, professional referees has led to a marked improvement in video based training for these officials, with successful training products emerging to enhance knowledge and application of the laws (e.g., Mascarenhas, Collins, Mortimer & Morris, 2005). To address our limited understanding of refereeing performance Mascarenhas, Collins and Mortimer (2005) developed the Cornerstones Performance Model of Refereeing, advocating five key areas of effective performance; knowledge and application of the laws; contextual judgment; personality and management skills; fitness, positioning and mechanics; and the psychological characteristics of excellence. However, although researchers have shifted the emphasis of refereeing research away from stress related investigations (e.g., Rainey & Hardy, 1999) into performance related studies (e.g., Jones, Paull & Erskine, 2002; MacMahon, Helsen, Starkes, & Weston, 2006) there is still a dearth of literature that directly investigates refereeing performance, particularly in football. Consequently, we conducted a series of internet and Sports Discuss searches to locate empirical research articles focusing on refereeing, umpiring, and judging sports. In addition, the contents pages of selected journals (The Sport Psychologist; Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology; Journal of Applied Sport Psychology; International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology; Journal of Sport Behavior; Journal of Sport Sciences) were inspected as these revealed the most articles following the initial searches. Since only 22 articles were found that directly looked at football refereeing performance we have also drawn upon research in officiating in other sports as well as ongoing research programs where the findings are relevant to football referees. This paper is structured around the following key elements of referee performance: (1) judging offside; (2) judgment of fouls and misconduct; (3) control of game procedures; (4) management of the game and refereeing style; (5) training complex high-performance skills, and finally conclusions and recommendations for future research. Judgment of Offside Ever since the laws of football were first set down in the 1850 s the offside law has been one of the most controversial. The modern version of Law 11 has been in place since 1925 and states that a player is offside if he is nearer to his opponents goal line than both the ball and the second last opponent (FIFA, 2004) at the moment the ball is played forwards by a team 101

4 member. The law has been subject to various interpretations and clarifications over the years with regard to the definition of nearer than and most recently with regard to what it means to be involved in active play. It is no longer an automatic offence to be in an offside position. A player in an offside position should only be penalized if he or she is interfering with play or an opponent or otherwise gaining an advantage. As a result of the most recent change, the decision of the referee or assistant referee (AR) has become much more complex. Firstly, the official must judge whether or not a player is in an offside position. This is in itself a complex judgment as it requires the relative positions of attackers, defenders and the ball to be determined in an instant. Secondly, the official must also decide whether or not a player in an offside position is interfering with play, interfering with an opponent, or otherwise gaining an advantage. So, while Oudejans, Verheijen, Bakker, Gerrits, Steinbrückner and Beek (2000, 2005) should be commended for inspiring a new avenue of investigation, unfortunately, much of this and the subsequent research that has been reported has focused mostly on the first judgment and thus only represents part of the complex task faced by the officials. Initially, researchers (Belda Maruenda, 2004; Sanabria, Cenjor, Marquez, Guitierrez, Martinez & Prados-Garcia, 1998) postulated that errors in judging offside were due to the time taken to shift gaze from the player releasing the ball to the player receiving the ball. This is certainly a problem for defenders facing towards their opponent who see a ball lofted over them and turn to see an attacker several meters behind them receive the ball. In these situations the defenders are prone to raising their arms and appealing for offside. However, the law relates specifically to the position of the players at the moment the ball is released and the position of the defenders and the direction of their gaze precludes them from making an accurate assessment of the situation as the attacker may have been onside at the moment the ball was played and then run several meters past the defenders. The principal task of the AR in judging offside is to maintain a position in line with the second last defender and facing towards the pitch so as to be best able to make an accurate judgment. As we shall see, ARs are in fact more likely to be just ahead or just behind the second last defender. Oudejans and his colleagues have systematically explored the possible effects of these positioning errors on the judgment of offside. Oudejans, Verheijen, Bakker, Gerrits, Steinbrückner and Beek (2000) designed a field experiment in which three expert ARs judged potential offside situations whilst viewing play between two youth teams. Out of 200 judgments, 40 (20%) were in error. It was not stated whether all the errors 102

5 were due to misperceptions of the relative positioning of the players or due to differing interpretations of the interference or advantage gained by being in an offside position. Given the nature of the analysis, it must be assumed that all the errors were deemed to be due to misperception of the players relative positions. Oudejans et al. (2000) noted that in the majority of situations (89%) the AR was standing ahead of the offside line by an average of 1.18 meters. This has important implications for the ARs judgments as shown in Figure 1. The geometry of the positions of the players and assistant referee make errors optically inevitable (Oudejans et al., 2000, p. 33). Oudejans et al. note that there are two possible kinds of errors: flagging for a player not offside and failing to flag for an actual offside. These are referred to as flag errors (FEs) and non-flag errors (NFEs) respectively. The authors predict a greater number of FEs when the attacker moves outside the defender on the far side of the pitch with the reverse occurring when the players are close to the AR. The empirical data collected in the field study were, in agreement with predictions with the proportion of FEs (82%) much greater when the players were far away than when the players were close to the AR (25%). There were also many more errors when the players were on the far side of the pitch (n = 28) than when they were nearby (n = 12). Oudejans et al. (2005) attribute this to the declining value of most depth cues beyond about 10m. Oudejans et al. (2000) cite additional data obtained from video recordings of 200 high-level matches in five European leagues that show exactly the same pattern of increased FEs for judgments made at a distance. In a follow-up study Oudejans, Bakker, Verheijen, Gerrits, Steinbrückner and Beek (2005) analyzed video recordings from four matches of one team in the Dutch Eredivisie. A total of 215 potential offside situations were selected and the video recording was used to determine the positions of the players and AR. The ARs flagged on 14 of the 19 occasions (74%) when a player was offside but also flagged 7 times when players were actually not offside. The authors calculate the overall error rate as 5.6% (the 12 errors divided by the 215 potential offside situations). However, the error rate could just as easily be claimed to be 26% (the proportion of actual offsides missed by the ARs) or even 33% (the proportion of times a raised flag was incorrect). These figures seem much closer to the error rate reported by Oudejans et al. (2000) in their previous study and to more recent data from Helsen, Gilis and Weston (2006) as noted below. Oudejans et al (2005) calculated the error rate to be 20% for more difficult cases (based on a criterion of longitudinal separation between the two players of less than 1 meter), which is closer to the above estimates and similar to the findings of Oudejans et al. (2000). 103

6 Fig Optical errors in judging offside positions. Positions of defenders are indicated by circles and attackers by triangles. The offside line (in line with the second last defender) is indicated by a dotted line. The typical position of the AR just ahead of the offside line is marked by a circle with a cross. From this position, the attacker furthest away (who is actually onside) appears to be ahead of the second last defender and the AR is likely to commit a flag error.. As in the previous study the ARs were exactly in line with the second last defender on only 13.5% of the potential offsides but mostly positioned about 1m ahead or behind the offside line. The authors claim that the results were again consistent with their theory that AR errors in judging offside are due to the optical projections of the players positions. These are non-veridical due to the consistent failure of the ARs to be positioned exactly in line with the second last defender. There was also a relationship between the speed that the ARs were moving and the number of errors. There were more errors made when the ARs were running or sprinting than when they were walking or jogging. This raises an interesting question for future research of whether referees decision making in other areas may also be impaired when moving at higher velocities. The contribution of another perceptual phenomenon known as the flash-lag effect to AR errors in judging offside has been suggested by Baldo, Ranvaud and Morya (2002). The flash-lag effect is where a moving object is perceived as spatially leading its real position at an instant defined by a time marker (Baldo et al., 2002, p.1205). This effect should lead to a tendency towards perceiving the attacking players as offside when in fact they are not, thus leading to a bias towards FEs rather than NFEs. Baldo et al. use Oude- 104

7 jans et al s (2000) data to show that there is an overall bias towards flag errors (57%) rather than NFEs (43%). Baldo et al. (2002) estimate that the flashlag effect leads ARs to see the attacking player as between 0.02 and 0.64 meters ahead of their actual position. The bias towards FEs rather than NFEs might be due to other factors. Baldo et al. (2002) acknowledge that ARs are motivated towards detecting offside since this is their primary responsibility during the game. If ARs consider it more of a failure to miss an actual offside than to incorrectly flag a player who is in fact onside, then there would be a bias towards FEs. Signal detection methodology (Wickens, 2001) could be used to test this explanation since it explicitly separates the observers sensitivity from their response bias. To our knowledge, no such study has been carried out. The most recent study of the role of optical errors and the flash-lag effect in ARs offside decisions has been reported by Helsen et al. (2006) using data taken from the 2002 FIFA World Cup. An experienced observer examined videotapes of all 64 matches and another observer rated a subset of situations. Inter-rater reliability was extremely high. Helsen et al. refer to a total of 256 offside incidents for which adequate data were available. Of these 189 were judged correctly by the ARs giving an error rate of 26.2% which included ruling out five goals that should have been allowed. Also, in accordance with previous findings, ARs were ahead of the offside line 85% of the time, although this did not differ between correct and incorrect decisions. As in previous studies, there was a clear bias towards flag errors, which comprised 87% of the total, although by assessing only the non-flag situations where defenders appealed for offside, the authors may not have examined a representative sample of non-flag events. Given these concerns and our contention for a potential bias towards flag errors, we encourage more research that specifically investigates the flash lag hypothesis for incidents where the attacker is running towards the goal. Regardless, there is some scientific evidence to suggest that the task of the AR in determining whether or not an attacking player is in an offside position is subject to error. Even experienced ARs have an error rate of approximately 25% for situations that are difficult to judge, although individual ARs may be considerably better or worse than this. It seems likely that both optical error due to the relative positioning of the defenders, attackers and ARs, and perceptual factors (e.g., the flash-lag effect ) contribute to the error rate. Both of these would affect the AR s sensitivity to the essential information. Studies have not directly assessed the relative importance of response bias and sensitivity to offside decision-making and this would be a useful contribution to better understanding of the problem. Studies have also failed to fully address the further 105

8 complications inherent in Law 11, which requires the officials to judge whether or not a player in an offside position is actually interfering with play, interfering with an opponent, or otherwise gaining an advantage. Judgment of Fouls and Misconduct According to Helsen and Bultynck (2004), about 28% of all observable referee decisions during a football match are about fouls and misconduct. Law 12 provides a detailed list of offences (e.g., kicking an opponent) and behaviors that should be penalized with sanctions of different degrees of severity (e.g., a direct free kick). While some of the listed offences refer to clearly observable criteria, such as spitting at an opponent, others refer to intentions that must be inferred from the observed behavior, for example, to kick the ball deliberately to his or her own goalkeeper or to play in a dangerous manner. In addition, at least two of the listed offences refer to multiple observations during a match: that is if a player persistently infringes the laws of the game and if he or she receives a second caution. The possible responses of a referee who identified one of the listed offences vary from indirect free kick, direct free kick, to penalty kick in combination with a warning, a yellow card, or a red card (sending off). The degree of severity of these sanctions follows from their likely consequences. For example, while an indirect free kick in the midfield has in most cases no other direct effect than determining the possession of the ball, a penalty kick has, most of the time, an immediate effect on the score of a match (e.g., in the European and World Championships since 1976, about 85% of all penalties that were awarded during regular match time resulted in a goal). The appropriate sanction for an offence depends partly on its nature (e.g., kicking an opponent should be penalized with a direct free kick and impeding the progress of an opponent with an indirect free kick) and partly on its location (e.g., in or outside the penalty area). Although judgments about fouls and misconduct are frequently treated in public as judgments about matters of fact, it is actually very difficult for most critical situations (e.g., a tackle) to determine the correct decision. For example, in an experimental study Nevill, Balmer, and Williams (2002) asked referees to make assessments on 47 typical incidents taken from an English Premier League match and found, among others, that none of these challenges resulted in a unanimous decision by all qualified referees participating in the study (see also Teipel, Gerisch, & Busse, 1983). Similarly, recent studies have found agreement rates between match referees and expert referee panels on such decisions to be between 70% (e.g., Fuller, Junge & Dvorak, 106

9 2004) and 79% (Andersen, Engebretsen & Bahr, 2004), so there is clearly a level of ambiguity that exists in these situations. In addition, some judgment criteria, such as the intention of a player, are by definition not directly observable or objectively measurable. As a consequence of the obvious ambiguity of most incidents, studies on judgments of fouls and misconduct have typically explored other psychological phenomena, rather than a pure examination of the judgment itself. Corresponding topics that have been addressed in the scientific literature so far include influences of the color of players uniform (Frank & Gilovich, 1988; Tiryaki, 2005); of a team s reputation (Jones, Paul & Erskine, 2002); of a referee s prior decisions (Plessner & Betsch, 2001); of gender stereotypes (Coulomb-Cabagno, Rascle & Souchon, 2005); and the phenomena of ingroup favoritism (Mohr & Larsen, 1998) and home advantage (Nevill, Balmer & Williams, 2002; Sutter & Kocher, 2004). Before we take a closer look at some of these studies, we would like to point to another problem of investigating accuracy in referee judgments of fouls and misconduct. As has been outlined before, football referees have to deal with several tasks at the same time and these tasks are associated with multiple goals. For example, while the task of identifying fouls and misconduct is primarily associated with the goal of being accurate, the task of game management may be more closely connected with the goals of producing flowing play and fairness (Rains, 1984). Clearly, in certain situations, these goals can interfere with each other. For example, sometimes referees do better in regulating a competition through minimal, necessary interventions instead of calling every infraction, as long as they do not amount to an unfair advantage to one team. Therefore, in principle one needs to prove that supposed biases in referees judgments and decisions do not serve another goal, such as game-flow, rather than accuracy before determining them to be error prone (Brand, Schmidt & Schneeloch, 2006; Mascarenhas, Collins & Mortimer, 2002). This highlights the difference between applying the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Nevertheless, the ability to make accurate judgments can also be considered as a prerequisite of making adaptive and fair decisions and the study of the processes that underlie biases can provide important hints on how to improve accuracy in judgments of fouls and misconduct (Plessner & Betsch, 2002). AGGRESSION AND THE COLOR OF PLAYERS JERSEYS In a frequently cited study, Frank and Gilovich (1988) investigated the influence of the color black on the perception of American football players. 107

10 They assumed that in most cultures there is a strong association between the color black and aggression. The black uniform of a sports team could, therefore, serve as a prime that automatically activates the concept of aggression in the referee. In one of their experiments, referees watched videotaped segments of a football game in which the defensive team was wearing either black or white uniforms. It was actually the same event in both cases; the uniforms color was controlled technologically. The referees made judgments about the defensive team s action after each play. The results showed that referees were more likely to penalize the team wearing a black uniform than the team wearing a white uniform. Thus, the association of a player s uniform color with aggression had an influence on referees evaluation of the severity of this player s foul play. Similar findings have been reported when the association with aggression came from a team s reputation (Jones, Paul & Erskine, 2002). The effect of the color black was studied in American football by Frank and Gilovich (1988) at a time when in football the only person who was allowed to be dressed in black was the referee. This has more recently changed. Therefore, it is an interesting question if the effect reported by Frank and Gilovich (1988) could affect referee decisions in football as well. Tiryaki (2005) addressed this question in a study with Turkish referees and found no corresponding influences of players black uniforms. Thus, the effect of the color black may not be valid in all sports and cultures. However, it remains an open question if other colors that are associated (in Western cultures) with attributes such as aggressiveness (red) or peacefulness/innocence (white) may exert an influence on football referees evaluation of foul play. A REFEREE S PRIOR DECISIONS In an experiment by Plessner and Betsch (2001), referees and football players in the role of a referee had to make decisions on 20-videotaped scenes from an actual match in the Spanish Primera Division. In three scenes of one video, defenders in their penalty areas committed potential fouls. The first two scenes involved the same team and the third scene occurred in the penalty area of the opposite team. In a second video, instead of the first foul scene inside the penalty area, a ball-out situation appeared on the screen. It was found that in comparison to those participants who saw the second video, participants who saw the first video were less likely to award a penalty when they had awarded a penalty before and more likely when they had not. This can also be described as a negative contingency between successive 108

11 penalty decisions concerning the same team. Additionally, a positive contingency was found between successive penalty decisions concerning first one and then the other team. No such effects could be found for similar sequences of free-kick decisions. Therefore, it is quite likely that referees perceive the possibility of awarding a penalty as a limited option that one should not take too frequently. This unwritten rule could at least partly explain the contrast effect in successive penalty decisions concerning the same team. That is, once participants awarded a penalty to a team, they are assumed to shift their criterion for awarding a penalty to the same team to a higher level in subsequent situations. Moreover, penalty situations may activate decision strategies that are somewhat equality oriented. This orientation could lead to a concession decision, as a kind of summary response to repeated offences, as well as to the assimilation effect that was found when both teams were involved. Similar results have recently been found with basketball referees when contact situations were presented in their original game sequence but not when they were presented as random successions of individual scenes (Brand et al. 2006). HOME ADVANTAGE The home advantage in team sports is one of the best-confirmed phenomena in sport psychology (e.g., Courneya & Carron, 1992). Although, it has been speculated for a long time that referees may be partly responsible for this effect, until recently there was little empirical evidence for this assumption. In a clever experiment, Nevill, Balmer, and Williams (2002) investigated whether crowd noise has an influence on football referees decisions concerning potential foul situations and, thus, the contribution to the phenomenon of a home advantage. They assumed that referees have learned to use crowd noise as a decision cue because in general it would serve as a useful indicator for the severity of the foul. However, because the reaction of a crowd is usually biased against the away team, the use of this knowledge would be inappropriate. In the experiment, referees had to assess various challenges videotaped from a match in the English Premier League. Half of them observed the video with the original crowd noise audible, whereas the other half viewed the video in silence. The presence or absence of crowd noise had a strong effect on decisions made by the referees. Most important, referees who viewed challenges in the noise condition awarded significantly fewer fouls against the home team than those observing the video in silence, thus consti- 109

12 tuting the effect of a home advantage (see also Sutter & Kocher, 2004). The authors concluded that this effect might be partly due to heuristic judgment processes in which the salient, yet potentially biased, judgment of the crowd served as a decision cue. Unfortunately, such research into home advantage has not yet explored the extent of the phenomenon with international referees, who may have developed a level of immunity through amassing considerable experience in refereeing in front of big crowds. The various experiments point to the fact that referees sometimes rely on knowledge that should have no influence on their decisions given that their primary goal is to be accurate. This is in line with the assumption that refereeing in sports follows general principles of social information processing (Plessner, 2005). Bless, Fielder and Strack (2004) introduced a sequence of information processing as a framework for the analysis of social judgments. The model differentiates between several subtasks or steps of information processing that link an observable input (e.g., a tackle) to a person s overt behavior (e.g., a referee sending a player off the field). At first, a stimulus has to be perceived (e.g., the referee needs to attend to the tackle situation). Next, the perceived stimulus is encoded, that means it is given meaning (e.g., it is categorized as an offence). Naturally, this step relies strongly on prior knowledge (e.g., the referee must retrieve the decision criteria for forbidden tackles from memory). In addition, the encoded episode will be stored (automatically) in memory and may influence future judgments, just as retrieved episodic memories can influence the present one (e.g., the referee remembers that the attacking player has been warned before). In a final step, the perceived and encoded input information together with the retrieved memories and other information that is available or inferred will be integrated into a judgment that can find its expression in a decision (e.g., awarding a free-kick and sending the attacking player off). When this framework is applied to the judgment of sport performance (Plessner & Haar, in press), it becomes obvious that an erroneous decision can stem from processes in different steps of information processing. For example, a referee s wrong decision to send off a player can be caused by his misperception that the player hit his opponent s leg instead of the ball, or by the false memory that the player has persistently infringed the rules of the game before this situation. To take adequate measures to prevent decision errors, it is therefore important to identify their sources on the corresponding processing steps. In the next section we emphasize the importance of the latitude in the laws to make decisions that are appropriate for the context of the game and the close relationship this serves with verbal and non-verbal management strategies to control the game. 110

13 Control of Game Procedures Referee performance is maintained through the development of rich knowledge structures of information. Stout, Cannon-Bowers and Salas (1996) would suggest that these knowledge structures provide referees with an accurate understanding of the game and are organized into mental models. Mental models enable accurate perceptions of elements in the environment, comprehension of their meaning and prediction of their future status (Endsley, 1988), providing referees with templates of patterns of play, enabling them to immediately react to situations with known responses. They contain both declarative and procedural information. The declarative mental model (DMM) provides knowledge of what and why, containing information about the concepts in the domain and the relationships between them (Converse & Kahler, 1992), while the procedural mental model (PMM) provides knowledge of how to do something, storing information about the steps that must be taken in order to complete the task or goal (Stout et al., 1996). As such, to get a complete picture of the mental model underpinning referees decisions, it is important to access both their DMM, for information on what the decision is based upon and their PMM to understand how they have chosen to manage the situation. Although neither of these has been directly examined in football refereeing, there is some empirical evidence for the employment of these two types of knowledge. For example, Jones, et al. (2002) found that while football referees prior knowledge of a team s aggressive tendencies did not affect their propensity to award more decisions against them, they did receive more yellow and red cards. Jones et al. suggested that this clear signal of intent was to prevent any anticipated future escalations of aggressive behavior. In fact, such signals of intent provided by the PMM, often termed preventative refereeing, are crucial for top-flight referees (National Association of Sports Officials, 1999). This was further evidenced by Mascarenhas (2005) who found that rugby union referees used stronger procedural behaviors as the consequences on scoreline and negative player behavior increased. This case study revealed that three international referees used their feel for the game, based on player empathy and understanding the consequences of potential decisions to make appropriate calls in the context of the game. For example, when a player s behavior could lead to an infringement that might create a potential scoring opportunity, referees used stronger verbal and non-verbal styles to prevent the player from infringing the law. Furthermore, such evidence is not limited to empirical research, as NGBs also suggest the need for referees to maintain a balance between game control and game flow, having a feeling for what the participants are trying to do and calling what is right for the game (FIFA, 2004, p. 53). 111

14 Therefore, rather than seeking consistency through a robotic application of the letter of the law, as England s top international rugby union referee remarked, refereeing at the top level is about finding a set of solutions that work for you on the day (Mascarenhas, 2005, p. 122). Providing you are understandable to the players and establish legitimacy in your decisions (Askins, Carter & Wood, 1981) the latitude of the laws remains one of the procedural tools that referees have at their disposal to manage the game. Management of the Game & Refereeing Style Management skills are crucial for elite football referees (Sabatini, 2002). Research has shown that the behavioral responses of officials can affect a player s psychological state (Bar-Eli, Levy-Kolker, Pie & Tennenbaum, 1995) and incidence of injury (Gilis, Weston, Helsen, Junge & Dvorak, 2006). Although there is little empirical evidence examining verbal and non-verbal communication skills, one study by Mellick, Flemming, Bull and Laugharne (2005) investigated effective and ineffective communication in national football referees and international rugby union referees. Mellick et al. (2005) identified seven important communication behaviors exhibited by national football referees and international rugby union referees: whistle; gaze; posture and movement; hand/arm signals; verbal explanation; control; style and composure; and time management. Good use of these communication behaviors allowed referees to achieve three goals; (1) to engage the offender s attention; (2) to project confidence in the decision; and (3) to promote the perception of the decision as fair and just. Thus, when referees were deemed to be effective, they utilized a loud, sharp blast of the whistle, engaged in direct eye contact, held a strong posture or moved slightly towards the incident zone with a strong and purposeful arm signal, whilst verbally indicating the offence, and if necessary explaining what players should do to avoid repeating the offence. Interestingly, such calm, definite and unhurried communication styles are similar to those that English rugby union referees and touch-judges are taught to adopt. Verbally they are trained to be clear, accurate and concise, and nonverbally their aim is to adopt postures that are relaxed, assured and confident (Morrison, 2002). These same groups of premier and national league level referees use the VAPER acronym (volume, articulation, pitch, emphasis and rate) to study their verbal interactions with players, to help ensure their voices do not convey stress to the players. Mellick et al. (2005) found that ineffective referee communications were typified by delayed whistles, poor eye contact, 112

15 backing away from the incident, hurried and sloppy signaling and failing to explain decisions. However, more research is required to fully understand the result of ineffective communications on the game. Referees have also used Thomas and Kilmann s (1974) conflict management style grid (see Figure 2) to assess and develop their communication skills. Mascarenhas, Mortimer and Collins (2001) used educational sessions to present video examples of different styles of rugby union refereeing, and oneon-one sessions (accompanied by video recordings of the referee s performance) to demonstrate individual referee s preferred styles. The emphasis was on first, understanding their own individual style and second, developing a more versatile range of management styles (see Conerly & Tripathi, 2004). The model was referred to throughout group discussions to examine appropriate styles of management with different players and in a variety of situations. Referees were informed of the tendency to resort to type, conforming to their own particular style, when the pressure increases and were thus encouraged to experiment with different styles during games with a low Fig Thomas and Kilmann s (1974) Conflict Management Style Grid adapted for Refereeing. 113

16 mental workload, as broadening their repertoire of management styles would allow them to adapt to refereeing an array of scenarios (Topp, 1999). Research on the use of different conflict management styles within sports teams suggests that professional coaches prefer collaborating, compromising and avoiding styles, and least prefer accommodating and forcing styles (Laios & Tzetzis, 2005). As conflict management is seen as a crucial skill for elite referees (Topp, 1999; Weinberg & Richardson, 1990), more research is needed to assess when referees should adopt certain styles. Although communication styles in referees have received very little empirical attention, one area that has recently attracted more research is in the training of sports officials. Training Complex Skills Football refereeing is a good example of a complex, high-performance skill. As previous sections have shown, refereeing involves much more than simply knowing the laws of the game. In common with other areas involving complex multi-faceted skills (e.g., medicine and aviation), the development of expertise in refereeing takes many years of deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993; MacMahon et al., 2006). Initial training is focused on declarative knowledge (laws of the game) followed by practical experience (refereeing lower grade matches) to develop procedural knowhow. Unfortunately, the attrition level is high (Rainey & Hardy, 1999; Taylor & Daniel, 1987) in the first year or two. Those who stick with refereeing may progress to higher grade matches after further study and field-assessments of match performance. As in other fields, this progression is often somewhat haphazard and dependent on the individual s motivation and good fortune in finding support from other referees and mentors. High attrition rates in comparable fields such as medicine and aviation have led to increased interest in more structured approaches to developing complex high-performance skills. Ericsson (2005) discusses the contribution of laboratory studies of skill acquisition. These have shown that performance improves when individuals repeatedly practice well-defined tasks which are followed by immediate feedback. For example, a tennis coach might get a player to execute hundreds of backhand volleys in order to improve this aspect of their game. Some aspects of football refereeing might, in principle, be segmented into simpler welldefined components, and subject to multi-trial with feedback training, as proved successful in rugby union refereeing (Mascarenhas, Collins, Mortimer & Morris, 2005), cricket umpiring (Craven, 1999) and linesmen s in/out decisions in tennis (Jendrusch, 2002). 114

17 However, even tasks such as determining offside have complex contextual elements that make this difficult. Nevertheless, some multi-media training programs have been developed by the English Football Association (Football Association, 2001) that provide repetitive practice with aspects of the referees positioning and movement in open and set play, although no empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of such training appears to have been conducted. Comparable tools developed in other domains such as police law enforcement and aviation have been empirically evaluated and shown to enhance performance (e.g., Helsen & Starkes, 1999; Wiggins & O Hare, 2003). Oudejans et al. (2005) have suggested that some kind of virtual training environment with real-life scenarios (see McLennan & Omodei, 1996) might help ARs to improve offside assessment. Simple tools, such as providing match incidents on DVD for practice in judging foul play are now produced by FIFA. The advantage of such tools is that they allow the participant to make numerous judgments of critical events in a short space of time, thus allowing referees to accumulate the necessary experience much quicker (cf., Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993). This is particularly important in football refereeing where FIFA rules dictate that elite officials must retire at 45 just when many (e.g., Pierluigi Collina who refereed the 2002 World Cup final) are performing at their peak. In fact, the Italian Referees Association raised this retirement age to 46 in Collina s case to allow him to referee for another season. The disadvantages include the camera angle which is not the same as the referee s view, the fact that the viewer is not in motion, and the lack of feel for the match overall. The main problem with developing simulations or virtual training environments is to ensure that the critical cues for judgment are used to guide performance (Roscoe, 1980). In many cases, such as landing an aircraft or judging offside, it is not certain what the critical cues are. Simulations that fail to provide the correct cues or that promote dependence on irrelevant or erroneous cues will not improve performance, and may in fact degrade it in real-world conditions. Nevertheless, it is likely that simulations and virtual training environments could usefully be developed for some of the tasks involved in refereeing. A low-tech tool for developing expertise in complex skills is the use of a personal logbook. In much the same way that an athlete can benefit from performance diaries (e.g., Evans, Jones & Mullen, 2004) such logbooks can be very helpful for referees. A logbook with details of games refereed and reflections on critical game incidents and how they were handled is a valuable tool for examining referee performance (Melrose, 2003). Feedback in the form of player or coach reaction and the comments of match assessors can also be incorporated. 115

18 The practice of recording and reflecting on every performance is a key component of reflective learning (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 1988). Reflective learning fosters a self-critical and open-minded approach that builds metacognitive skills. One of the common characteristics of elite performers is that they recognize that they never stop learning (Collina, 2003). Simply having experiences does not lead to enhanced performance unless the key elements of the experience are understood and reflected on (Henley & Bye, 2003). The best predictor of expert performance is the amount of time spent in deliberate practice where the individual is consciously striving for improvement (Ericsson, 2005). Conclusions and Implications for Future Research This paper reviews relevant articles that explore football refereeing performance. Clearly the dearth of high-quality empirical research restricts both applied sport psychology practitioners understanding as well as the referees development in this important area. We have drawn attention to the potential biases involved in referees judgments and advocate the importance of recognizing individual styles of refereeing. Using a judgment framework such as Bless et al s (2004) where researchers examine elements of perception, encoding, storage, and retrieval of information will lead us to a better understanding of the relevant and irrelevant cues that referees draw upon. For example, this might shed some light upon referees mediation between a strict application of the law (the letter of the law) and their attempts to maintain flow in the game (the spirit of the law). Crucially, we must explore the reasons underpinning referees and ARs decisions (cf., Mascarenhas et al., 2002) such as response bias that might lead ARs to make more FEs than NFEs. We challenge researchers to focus on more complex aspects of the offside law that includes interfering with play/opponents or otherwise gaining an advantage. Since video technology is often the catalyst for referee rebuke, we propound the use of such technologies to further our understanding. Much more could be done to incorporate match incidents into training, using video records or virtual reality. For example, the work of McLennan and Omodei (1996) in using head-mounted cameras to investigate real-life scenarios has recently been adopted to train the decision-making of New Zealand s High Performance Cricket Umpires. Finally from an applied perspective, we encourage training interventions to improve refereeing performance by exposing the experts declarative and 116

19 procedural knowledge that underpins their decisions, and practical exercises to develop a broad repertoire of appropriate conflict management skills in order to effectively manage the game. The effectiveness of such behavioral approaches needs to be properly evaluated and carefully compared to the cost-effectiveness of other technologically based interventions that may be introduced in the future. REFERENCES Andersen, T.E., Engebretsen, L., & Bahr, R. (2004). Rule violations as a cause of injuries in male Norwegian professional football: Are the referees doing their job? American Journal of Sports Medicine, 32(Suppl.1), 62S-68S. Askins, L., Carter, T., & Wood, M. (1981). Rule enforcement in a public setting: The case for basketball officiating. Qualitative Sociology, 4, Baldo, M. V. C., Ranvaud, D. R., & Morya, E. (2002). Flag errors in soccer games: The flash-lag effect brought to real life. Perception, 311, Bar-Eli, M., Levy-Kolker, N., Pie, J. S., & Tennenbaum, G. (1995). A crisis-related analysis of perceived referees behavior in competition. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 7, Belda Maruenda, F. (2004). Can the human eye detect an offside position during a football match? British Medical Journal, 329, Bless, H., Fiedler, K., & Strack, F. (2004). Social cognition How individuals construct social reality. New York: Psychology Press. Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1998). Reflection: Turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page. Brand, R., Schmidt, G., & Schneeloch, Y. (2006). Sequential effects in elite basketball referees foul decisions: An experimental study on the concept of game management. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 28, Collina, P. (2003). The rules of the game. London: Macmillan Conerly, K., & Tripathi, A. (2004). What is your conflict style? Understanding and dealing with your conflict style. The Journal for Quality and Participation, 27, Converse, S. A., & Kahler, S. E. (1992). Knowledge acquisisition and the measurement of shared mental models. Unpublished manuscript, Naval Training Systems Center, Orlando, FL. Coulomb-Cabagno, G., Rascle, O., & Souchon, N. (2005). Players gender and male referees decisions about aggression in French Soccer: A preliminary study. Sex Roles, 52, Courneya, K. S., & Carron, A. V. (1992). The home advantage in sport competitions: A literature review. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 14, Craven, B. J. (1999). A psychophysical study of leg-before-wicket judgments in cricket. British Journal of Psychology, 89, Endsley, M. R. (1988). Design and evaluation for situation awareness enhancement. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32 nd Annual Meeting (pp ). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society. 117