The Video Doesn't Show What Happened.

It Shows a Rendering of It.

Ian Renshaw & Keith Davids review Schütz, Betsch & Plessner (2026): "The Impact of Video Speed on Intention Attribution," with special guest Scott Russell

The morning after the podcast, a VAR intervention chalked off an incredible length-of-the-field goal because of a potentially “soft” foul on their own goal line. Is this what VAR was meant to do?

Somewhere in the middle of this World Cup, an assistant referee's flag went up because an attacker's toe was a few millimetres ahead of a defender's. A goal was chalked off. Days earlier, a header deflected off a defender's skull at walking pace, replayed through Snicko so the broadcast could isolate the exact frame of contact, and the resulting offside call turned on whether that contact counted as “intentional.” Nobody on the pitch experienced either moment the way the review did. Something changes between the game as it's played and the game as it's replayed, and a new paper landed at exactly the moment football needed to ask what.

Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids called it an emergency podcast: VAR dominating the news cycle, and a paper on their desks asking the precise question everyone was already shouting about. They brought in Scott Russell (a former A-League-level assistant referee, now a researcher studying how officials incorporate social expectations into their decisions) to referee the conversation itself.

Does Slow Motion Make You Look Guilty?

Schütz, Betsch and Plessner ran four studies, building from abstract stick figures up to real match footage, testing whether slowing footage down changes how intentional an action looks. The answer was yes, but not in a straight line. Judged intent rose steadily as footage slowed, peaked at around 1.5 seconds, then eased back off. Adding a visibly reacting bystander pushed intent judgments higher again. Crowd noise did too.

The participants, worth flagging early, were students, not referees. “That's probably important to notice there,” Ian said. But the mechanism the paper describes doesn't require expertise to operate. It's a property of the footage, not the viewer.

Two Theories, One Disagreement About What "Information" Means

The paper explains its finding from a cognitive-attributional standpoint: slower footage gives viewers more time to build an internal model of what happened, and that elaboration process inflates perceived intent. Keith acknowledged that the paper was written from a cognitive perspective, then reframed it.

“Ecological psychology focuses on the structure of information. Cognitive psychology historically is focused on the amount of information that an individual perceives, which then needs elaboration, inference internally from a model of the world.”

KEITH DAVIDS

Slowing the footage down doesn't just give you more time to think; it changes what's structurally available to see. That distinction matters because it points to a different fix. If the problem is “not enough time to process,” the fix is more replay. If the problem is “the structure of the information itself has changed,” more replay is the thing making it worse.

The Footage Is Already a Story

Scott's contribution was the line Keith called the quote of the session, delivered before the paper had even come up:

“You can't complain about the video assistant referee if you're going to use video effects.”

SCOTT RUSSELL

He was talking about background blur on the call. He was also, unintentionally, framing the entire episode.

Scott returned to the point with more weight later: “Even in real-time footage, that is not what happened. That's just a rendering of what happened... it's just the best artist's impression.” Every recording deprioritises some things and highlights others. Slow motion just makes the selection more aggressive.

Ian's own research gave the theory teeth. Building occlusion videos for a cricket-perception study years ago, he had to decide which exact frame counted as ball release, and the honest answer was that no single frame does. “How many frames per second have you got at ball release? Sometimes the ball would be here, and sometimes it would be there.” The same ambiguity sits underneath every offside review currently deciding World Cup matches: a toe, a shoulder, a fingertip, frozen at a frame boundary that was never meant to carry that much weight.

Players Have Learned to Play the Camera, Not Just the Game

If replay changes what's visible, players adapt to that fact, and Keith argued they already have. Attackers now position a trailing leg into a defender's path not to win the ball but to manufacture the appearance of contact; a hand goes up, a body goes down, and the incident is built to survive review rather than to reflect what happened.

“Players are becoming skillful of manipulating information that's available for referees... to afford a referee to perceive a possible action.”

KEITH DAVIDS

Real-time, a referee reads intent, effort, and context. Frozen at the frame where a limb makes contact, all of that disappears, and the isolated image does the players' work for them.

What the Paper Recommends, and Where the Hosts Went Further

Schütz et al. suggest defaulting to standard-speed footage for disciplinary decisions, reserving slow motion for narrowly technical fact-finding. Keith translated that into a concrete officiating principle drawn from cricket and rugby: VAR should answer closed, specific questions: did the foot cross the line, did the ball touch the ground, not open ones like “tell me what happened,” which invites exactly the kind of reconstruction the paper shows is unreliable.

The hosts' clearest example of the alternative sat in rugby league. Referee Ashley Klein sent off a player in State of Origin, was shown video suggesting otherwise, and kept his original decision. Scott, watching as a fan rather than a researcher, called it a defining moment for the sport: a referee treating replay as a check on a decision already made, not a replacement for having made one. Ian's own proposal for football's offside law follows the same logic in miniature: any overlap between attacker and defender counts as onside. Not a fingertip. Daylight.

The World Cup will keep generating these moments (a toe, a header, a freeze-frame) right up until someone changes the law or the practice. This paper won't settle that argument. But it does something more useful: it explains, with data, why the frozen frame keeps lying to us in the same direction every time.

 Podcast Link - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2354827/episodes/19472212

Ian Renshaw & Keith Davids, with Scott Russell, The Constraints Collective