RESEARCH ARTICLE
Physical Performance and Decision Making in Association Football Referees: A Naturalistic Study
D.R.D. Mascarenhas1, *, C. Button2, D. O’Hare2, M. Dicks 2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 2
First Page: 1
Last Page: 9
Publisher ID: TOSSJ-2-1
DOI: 10.2174/1875399X00902010001
Article History:
Received Date: 31/03/2008Revision Received Date: 30/09/2008
Acceptance Date: 30/09/2008
Electronic publication date: 05/02/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Although researchers have independently investigated the physical and decision-making (DM) demands experienced by sports officials, the combined impact of locomotion and physiological factors upon DM has received little attention. Using an innovative combination of video and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology this study explored the movement, heart rate (HR) and DM of experienced football referees in their natural performance environment. A panel of independent referees analysed incidents (n = 144) taken from five referees in seven games in the New Zealand Football Championship (2005/06). The match-day referees made accurate decisions on 64% of the incidents, although their accuracy levels were not related to variables such as movement speed, HR, and cumulative distance covered. Interestingly, referees were on average only 51% accurate in the opening fifteen minutes of each half compared to 70% accuracy at all other times. This study demonstrated that it is possible to combine new emerging technologies to conduct a comprehensive study of naturalistic decision-making in sport.
