Foul or dive? Motor contributions to judging ambiguous foul situations in football

Abstract

Football (soccer) referees frequently face situations in which they have to distinguish dives and fouls. Yet, little is known about the contributing factors that characterise the ability to judge these ambiguous situations correctly. To this end, in the current article we tested the hypothesis that motor experience of observers contributes to the visual identification of deceptive actions. Thereto, we asked skilled football referees, skilled football players, wheelchair bounded football fans (thus with limited motor experience) and novices to judge whether potential tackle situations in football were either fouls or dives. Results revealed that the referees (accuracy 72.2%, s=6.2) and players (accuracy 72.0%, s=6.4) were better at discriminating fouls and dives than the fans (accuracy 61.1%, s=7.2) and the novices (accuracy 57.4%, s=7.0) (P < 0.001). The results seem to point to an added value of motor experience in detecting deceptive movements.

Keywords:

• Deception
• dives
• fouls
• motor experience
• referees

Notes

¹Originally we aimed for 18 participants per group. For the group of skilled players we achieved this number with the exception of one player who was not available for testing due to being ill. As concerns the referees we depended on the Dutch Football Association. The association made it possible that we measured all referees (n=31) on one of their training days. After approaching over 50 wheelchair bounded fans, in the end 12 qualified participants were willing to participate within the time span of the study. Statistically we checked whether corrections were needed, but Levene's test of Equality of Error Variance was not significant indicating that homogeneity of variance was not violated and that corrections were not necessary.

²We had no reason to believe that the fans’ visual-cognitive skills were impaired by their injury. Seven participants of this group were active as wheelchair basketball players. Therefore, we assumed that they had no problems with their visual-cognitive skills. We visited the other five participants in their home and we noticed no signs of visual or cognitive impairments during our contact with them or when they filled in the accompanying questionnaire asking for their experiences with football. One potential participant was excluded because we did have doubts about his visual-cognitive skills and whether he fully understood the task.

³Note that analyses on the percentage of foul judgements are redundant with analyses on the percentage of dive judgements.

⁴To rule out that the variable ‘age’ influenced the accuracy scores, we included age as a covariate. The 2 (foul, dive)×4 (referees, players, fans, novices) ANCOVA on accuracy scores with age as covariate revealed no significant effects of age.