Abstract
The present study uses a quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of team preferences on the accuracy of offside judgments. In Experiments 1 and 2, supporters of two German soccer clubs (i.e., Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04) judged offsides in artificial scenes from a match between the clubs. We expected that supporters of both clubs would less frequently report the offside position of a forward from the preferred team. The results of Experiment 1 partly confirmed the predictions. Both groups reported the offside position of a yellow forward less frequently than that of a blue forward, and this effect was much larger for supporters of Borussia Dortmund than for supporters of Schalke 04. The difference between groups could be attributed to team preferences. The weaker effect of team preference in supporters of Schalke 04 was attributed to an unexpected perceptual effect that increased the accuracy of offside judgments for blue forwards in both groups. Experiments 2 and 3 showed the presumed effect of team preferences and the perceptual effect, respectively, in isolation. In summary, the results of our experiments provide evidence for (a) an effect of team preferences and (b) an effect of shirt–background contrast on offside judgments in soccer.
Highlights
The offside rule is fundamental in modern soccer
We suspected that experience in refereeing might reduce the impact of team preferences on offside judgments because referees are expected to be neutral on their job
A large majority of participants in both groups declared having favored neither team during the offside judgment task
Summary
The offside rule is fundamental in modern soccer. According to the offside rule, a player P of the attacking team can only score a regular goal if—at the moment a teammate passes the ball to player P—player P is not closer to the opponents’ goal than the second-last defender, including the goalkeeper (cf. FIFA 2015, Laws of the Game, p. 36). The primary purpose of this rule is to make scoring goals more difficult for the players and, more interesting for the observer. When a group of people is watching a soccer match, contradictory judgments are sometimes made of the same offside situation. As many soccer fans may have already observed, different judgments of the same offside situations are often correlated with different team preferences. Supporters of the team that scored a goal often judge the position of the scoring player as not offside, whereas supporters of the opposing team judge the position of the same player as offside. How can this happen? Is it possible that supporters of opposing teams sometimes perceive the same game situation differently? Or do supporters tend to claim what benefits their team, independently of the facts?
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