Study Says Referees Root for the Home Team

Sports conspiracy theorists, rejoice: your proof has arrived.

A study couthored by a researcher in Harvard’s Department of Psychology suggests that most referees are subconsciously biased in favor of the home team.

Ryan H. Boyko ’05, a research assistant for Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser in the department’s Cognitive Evolutionary Laboratory, led the examination that spanned a 14-year period in England’s Premiership soccer league.

He found that the fans do indeed spur teams on to victory at home games—but they do so by influencing the referees rather than the players.

“People assume that most, if not all of their home advantage is that as fans, they go to the stadium and cheer and make their team play better,” Boyko said. “But if what’s actually happening is that referees are subconsciously being intimidated, that makes it less fair.”

Boyko, who is also an amateur-level soccer referee, said that his study shows that “individual referees give more advantage than would be expected by chance.”

He added that the effect is more pronounced with some referees than others.

“Who you get as a referee tells you how much home advantage you’re going to get,” he said.

Harvard football coach Tim Murphy said that while he hasn’t seen any officiating bias in the Ivy League, his experiences as a coach elsewhere supported Boyko’s findings.

“When I was at Cincinnati, I did notice a big difference,” Murphy said. “Whenever we’d play an SEC [Southeastern Conference] team, we had Southeastern Conference officials and not Conference-USA officials. If you went to Kentucky or Tennessee, I think the bias of the officials was palpable.”

Boyko’s team also found that the partiality was more prevalent among less experienced referees.

But Harvard men’s lacrosse coach Scott Anderson said he believes that some of that partiality might actually increase with time, because more seasoned referees are more inclined to make calls based on their past experience.

Boyko conducted the research with his two brothers, both former soccer referees.

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Sports Sciences, according to a Harvard press release.

Though the study focuses on European soccer—well-known for its incredibly zealous fan-base—the researchers asserted the findings were applicable more generally.

The brothers also concluded that referees exhibit biases even on neutral soil.

“When we included the team itself, the name of the team as a factor, that was also significant,” Ryan said. “There is a suggestion that even when controlling for skill differences, certain teams are just better at getting home advantage.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.