Supposing you wanted to fix a match, what could you do?

Indeed Professor Alan Neill, of Wolverhampton University, who investigated this issue concluded that “The evidence is overwhelming.”   Indeed, he concluded that the crowd effect is palpable across all sports where a crowd is active.

Over ten years ago, Professor Nevill invited 40 qualified referees to judge 47 incidents from a 1998-99 Premier League game between Liverpool and Leicester.  Half of the invitees watched while also hearing the sound of the crowd, while a control group watched the same recording but with no sound. Those viewing the video with crowd noise being audible felt there were 15% fewer fouls against the home team, compared with those who watched the same footage without any crowd noise.

Thus to answer the question in the headline, one might suggest you look at the referee and choose a game where the referee has a particular favourite type of resullt.  Then there is no need to do anything – just let the ref do his normal thing.. 

The resultant paper – “The 12th Man? Refereeing bias in English and German soccer” – also reported that home teams were given fewer disciplinary cards, irrespective of the flow of the game.

Now you might think, or indeed you might hope that improved referee training could change this. But in a further article in the Psychology of Sport and Exercise the same author suggests matters are not that simple. 

One of the findings that this type of research has revealed is that home advantage has declined in England and Scotland which researchers tend to put down to a  “systematic improvement” in referees’ decision-making accuracy.  Thiss in turn they explain as arising from better training and monitoring.   Also it seems that the greatest change arises in the lower leagues which is where, it is said, the crowd can have the greatest influence.   The conlcusion is. “Referees’ objective capabilities are still not immune to the unconscious influence of the crowd.”

The research also suggests that shouting can help your team, but research again suggests this is not likely to be so.   Research cited by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, suggests that in the reverse can be true.   This possibly suggests that the extra crowd noise can make the players more nervous!

But as David Forrest, professor of economics at Salford University, points out. “randomness and noise create uncertainty of outcome”.   In short in such situatons, we can never really be sure what noise or silence is going to do for a player taking a penalty.  

Of course the problem we have in the Premier League is that discussions of referee bias generally get fixated on individual issues like the number of penalty a team is awarded, which may have no statistical significance at all.

The fact is that games might be won through a genuine mistake by an official, or by one side being better than the other, or indeed by an official being bribed, or of course by a player being bribed.   These approaches that look at individual issues are unlikely to be able to unravel such matters.

However, what we could investigate in the Premier League is the huge variance between referees, where some oversee multiple home wins, as others see numerous away wins.   That situation has never been considered, so one could go further and ask why it has never been looked at.   Such figures, however, don’t exactly predict the outcome of each game, but it is clear that referees do tend to oversee games that give certain results, which really is not how it should be.