It’s no secret that referees are influenced by crowd pressure. Why do you think people talk about ‘home advantage’, and until a few years ago, away goals counted more than goals scored at home in the knockout stages of European competitions? That’s certainly not because football players can feel the difference in the variety of grass growing on the field.
No, it’s because a team’s fans make a lot of noise (special shoutout to Irish football fans who made the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life when they once won 1-0 against Germany). And that sound motivates the home team but also influences the referee’s decisions.
Using all matches in the fifth league of German football and the top two tiers of German women’s football between 2015 and 2019, a team around Finn Spilker analyzed how much injury time referees would add to a match at the end of the regular 90 minutes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when the match was close (a draw or just one goal apart), referees generally added more stoppage time than when the match was actually over. What’s the point of adding 5 minutes of stoppage time when one team is three goals ahead? And if there are more people in the audience, the preference for the home team increases.
But what you might not have expected is that female referees are more influenced by this crowd pressure than male referees. The diagram below shows the injury time awarded by the referee when the home team is one ahead, the match is a draw or the home team is one behind.
Note the difference between the orange area for male referees and the blue area for female referees. When the home team has a one-goal lead, female referees are more likely to reduce the injury time awarded, which obviously gives the home team an advantage.
Crucially, the authors do not speculate as to why female referees bend more to social pressure than male referees; they simply note that this is a fact and that among female referees, younger referees are more susceptible to bowing to social pressure than older, more experienced referees.
Injury time awarded and home team lead
Spilker et al. (2025)
#90th #minute #home #team #ahead..