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YOU win some, you lose some. Unless you’re England – then you just lose.

As the 2018 World Cup kicks off in Russia, football fans across the globe are eagerly sizing up their team’s chances. Will it be Germany again? Or dark horse Belgium? Or will the trophy go outside Europe for the first time since 2002?

This year, fans will have someone new to blame when things go wrong: the video referee. For the first time in the World Cup, decisions in all 64 games of the tournament will be watching video footage of the game. Referees are only human, and over the past decade or so we have learned how psychological tics can make decisions go awry. The aim of the new technology is to cut out these quirks of perception. Trouble is, it might end up just introducing new ones.

We love to criticise, but it is hardly surprising that footballing officials make mistakes. They have to follow a fast-moving, free-flowing game and they can’t watch all 22 players at once. But specific effects make some decisions more error-prone than others.

Take offside decisions, the bugbear of many a football fan. An attacking player is offside if they are closer to the opposition’s goal line than the second-last opponent at the time a teammate plays the ball towards them. This sounds simple enough (maybe), but it runs afoul of a visual illusion called the flash-lag effect: a moving object is perceived as being further forward than it actually is when a second event, , occurs. “The brain is not so good at the exact timing of events because we don’t need that at the conscious level,” says , an experimental psychologist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium.

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This means that assistant referees, who observe play from the sidelines and help in judging offside decisions, often see players as offside when they actually aren’t. “In the 2002 World Cup in Japan, one out of four offside decisions was incorrect because of the flash-lag,” says , a sports scientist also at KUL who heads referee training for UEFA, the European football association.

You can’t get rid of that with practice alone, says Wagemans. “It’s only something you can overcome by not trusting your perception any more, and correcting at the conscious level.”

Not accurate, but fair

After the 2002 World Cup, football governing bodies began to give assistant referees video training to make them aware of the flash-lag effect. An independent analysis by Wagemans, Helsen and others showed that the number of between the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.

Video-assisted refereeing, which is already in use in several competitions around the world, aims to improve the quality of referees’ decisions still further, by allowing off-pitch officials to review replays during the flow of the game. This will be used to verify calls at certain crucial moments: in the run-up to goals, in the event of a penalty kick or red card being awarded for a foul, and to ensure the right player is given a red or yellow card. In a study conducted for the International Football Association Board, which regulates the rules of football, Helsen found that such reviews prevent game-changing errors in about 9 per cent of matches. The overall accuracy of refereeing decisions .

For positional judgements such as whether a foul occurred inside the penalty area, viewing a slow-motion replay helps an official get a call right, says Helsen. But other calls hinge on a player’s intent, such as whether a foul was egregious enough to warrant a red card, or whether a player intended to touch the ball with their hand. Not every instance of that is as obvious as Argentinian legend Diego Maradona’s unforgotten and unforgiven “” goal, which helped knock England out of the 1986 World Cup.

Here slow-motion video review might make decisions worse, not better – again, because of the way our minds work. “Slow motion changes the way we perceive incidents,” says , a psychologist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. “It looks as if the player has more time to decide what he does, so it always looks worse.”

With this perceptual bias in mind, video officials are instructed on when to use slow motion and when to use real time in replays. “To check if a foul is inside or outside the penalty area, slow motion can be used,” says Helsen. “But to examine the impact of a foul or a tackle, real time has to be used.”

Over the years, psychologists have also identified a host of external factors affecting officials’ decisions, at least in lab-based tests. Hearing crowd noise seems to increase the . Players’ shouts and cries of pain influence the decision of for a foul tackle. “This isn’t conscious, and it’s not going to happen if you have a very obvious foul,” says , a cognitive sports scientist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. “It’s when the call could go either way, a borderline call, that these factors have an effect.”

Video-assisted refereeing should reduce such subjective influences. But others worry that paying too much attention to whether decisions are technically correct risks interfering with the subtle art of refereeing. “There is an important law, which is not written in the book,” says Helsen. “The law of common sense.”

“Football is a flawed game officiated over by flawed officials – and that’s why we love it”

How this plays out shows most clearly in the awarding of penalty kicks. Penalties are the most severe call a referee can make, because most result in a goal. Back in 2001, Plessner showed that referees award two penalty kicks against the same team if the calls were independent events, apparently balancing their calls to avoid determining the outcome of the game. “Everybody knows that if there are four or five penalties in a game, there’s something wrong with the referee,” he says. “A referee has to guide a game. It should be fair, it should be balanced, and that’s a different goal from just being accurate.”

Fan and football podcaster goes even further: football is a flawed game, he says, played and officiated over by flawed people. That is precisely why we love it so much – and why, in his opinion, video-assisted referees are a waste of space. “This is football’s latest attempt at perfection it doesn’t need, shouldn’t want and can never achieve.”

It seems whether to employ video-assisted referees is itself a judgement call. Only one thing’s for sure: whoever’s in charge, England won’t win.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The video-assisted ref’s a…”