News: The Reason Why Fellaini Picks Up So Many Cards

ark215 · Jan 26, 2010

The German defender Philipp Lahm, a diminutive 5 foot 7, is often described as skillful, heady and tenacious. A veritable frantic smurf on the back line for his national team (63 caps) and club team, Bayern Munich (more than 120 games since 2005), who often encounters taller and stronger opponents.
“Lahm hardly has a foul called against him,” Dr. Steffan Giessner said in a telephone interview. “He plays tough. People pick up on small players and say they are really tough guys.”
But Giessner, 35, and Dr. Niels van Quaquebeke, 32, two German scientists and researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, assert in a paper entitled “Height-Related Bias in Foul Calls,” published on the Web on Tuesday (and in the February edition of the subscription-only Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology) that soccer’s tall people usually got the short end of the stick in ambiguous situations when a referee calls a foul. Their research indicates that taller people are more likely to be perceived by referees (and fans) as foul perpetrators and their smaller opponents as the victims.

“I’m pretty short, and when I play basketball I tended to get away with a lot of fouling,” van Quaquebeke said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands. “Humans are not objective. We assume that humans are rational beings in a social world. But we would argue that we all have information processing machines in our heads that cannot attend to all the information we receive. We have rule of thumbs that guide us through life, which leads us to make sometimes a wrong decision. In evolutionary terms, we associate size with aggression, dominance and power. Now we can show, via data, that this is still in our thinking — including a referee in soccer.
“There are usually two discussions: to provide technical assistance for refs in the form of video and slow-mo replays or, like FIFA, taking a very conservative stance and say that it is a human sport that with the intrusion of technology would take away from the flow and make it not as exciting. By training refs in new and different ways you could train against bias.”
The study is based on data compiled by Impire AG, a German company that catalogs statistics on major European sports, including seven soccer seasons of the Bundesliga (85,262 fouls) and Champions League (32,142), and three World Cups (6,440), a tally of more than 100,000 fouls.
“We chose football because the sport often yields ambiguous foul situations in which it is difficult to determine the perpetrator,” van Quaquebeke said. “In such situations, people must rely on their instincts to make a call, which should increase the use and the detectability of a player’s height as an additional decision cue. By providing scientific insights on potential biases in refereeing, our work might help officials weigh the options. It is not our call on how on findings should be used. Perhaps in better training for refs.”
Beyond the data, which van Quaquebeke and Giessner assert show that taller players are called for more fouls, they conducted experiments with fans in which they were shown photographs of a smaller and a taller player running side by side, pictures in which no actual fouls had been committed. Generally, the results show that participants are more inclined to anticipate the taller player to foul the smaller. The subjects anticipated a foul by the taller player, and, told that the taller player was on the ground in subsequent photos, believed that he had taken a dive, but when the smaller player was shown on the ground the subjects assumed he had been fouled by the bigger player.
In conclusion the authors wrote: “We have shown that refereeing in football has, to quote Joseph S. Blatter, a very ‘human face.’ Indeed, referees are not objective and perfect information processors, but human and thus also subject to socially learned and evolutionarily formed cognitive associations which sometimes bias their judgment.”
Giessner and van Quaquebeke both acknowledged that their recent study of fouls in soccer liberated them from the more mundane management topics they are used to dealing with. Delving into the realm of sports has actually made their work fun.
“We’ve talked with our colleagues about the opportunities to use sports data to illuminate management concepts,” Giessner said. “And suddenly all management researchers have at least one sports paper in the C.V. Yeah, we too do our management stuff. But we’re fans, too.”
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http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/...-for-tall-guys-new-report-asserts/?ref=sports

lol im kidding of course. just a semi interesting article on a slow day.

Fajkus Rules · Jan 27, 2010

Actually, there is probably more truth to this than the average fan would assume. At lower levels, you'll see smaller players come flying into bigger players, bounce off and go down, and the ref gives the foul to the larger player, even if he/she is simply shielding the ball and holding their own position.

At higher levels, you'd think that "automatic foul" bias would be minimized, but in Fellaini's case, he also plays a position primarily responsible for disrupting the opponents' attacks, which he does by positioning, skill, anticipation & physicality of challenge. Given that he can be sanctioned for both frequency of fouls as well as the toughness of fouls committed, he is something of a magnet for cautions. Goes with the job.