Hi
This one's jumping the queue.
We'd planned a different theory paper for this month's slot, but with VAR dominating every World Cup headline right now, we couldn't sit on this one — so we're calling it an emergency podcast and getting it to you as soon as we can. The usual theory paper is pushed back a slot; you'll still get it, just next.
Schütz, Betsch & Plessner (2026) — "The Impact of Video Speed on Intention Attribution"— Psychology of Sport & Exercise.
Four experiments, open access, and a question that's been sitting behind every controversial replay decision this tournament: "does slowing footage down make an action look more intentional than it actually was?"
We also did something we've never done before — brought in a guest for a theory paper. Scott Russell, a former referee and now a researcher studying how officials make decisions under social pressure, joined Ian and Keith to referee the argument itself.
What the paper found
- Judged intent rose the more footage was slowed down — but only up to a point.
- Intent judgments peaked at around **1.5 seconds** of slowdown, then eased off again.
- A visibly reacting bystander in the footage pushed intent judgments higher still.
- Crowd noise did the same
Participants were students, not referees — worth keeping in mind, but the effect doesn't depend on expertise. It's a property of the footage.
The line of the night
Before the paper was even mentioned, Scott landed this one about his own video background blur — and it ended up summing up the whole episode:
"You can't complain about the video assistant referee if you're going to use video effects."
Keith called it the quote of the session. He wasn't wrong.
Why we didn't just take the paper's explanation
The paper explains its own finding in cognitive terms — slower footage gives you more time to build a mental model, and that inflates perceived intent. Keith pushed back on the framing rather than the finding:
"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."*
That's not a small disagreement. If the problem is "not enough processing time," you fix it with more replay. If the problem is "the structure of the information has actually changed," more replay is what's making it worse. Scott's framing backed this up from the officiating side: "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."
Why the Frame You See Isn't the Frame That Happened
Ian pulled in his own old occlusion research — building videos for a cricket-batting perception study, he had to pick the exact frame that counted as "ball release," and there was no clean answer. "Sometimes the ball would be here, and sometimes it would be there." he mimed. Same problem, same stakes, as every toe-offside and fingertip handball this World Cup is being decided on. The frame boundary was never built to carry that much weight.
Keith went further: players have learned to play the review, not just the game. "Players are becoming skillful of manipulating information that's available for referees... to afford a referee to perceive a possible action." A trailing leg placed just so, a hand that goes up, a body that goes down — built to survive review.
What we would actually change
The paper's own recommendation: default to standard-speed footage for disciplinary calls, keep slow motion for narrow technical fact-finding only. Keith and Ian took it further with a real example — rugby league referee Ashley Klein was shown video suggesting his send-off decision was wrong, and kept his original call anyway. Scott, watching as a fan, called it one of the most important officiating moments in years: replay as a check on a decision, not a replacement for having made one.
Ian's own proposal for football's offside law follows the same idea in miniature: any overlap between attacker and defender is onside. Not a fingertip. Daylight.
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Listen
This one runs just under 80 minutes
→ [Listen to the full session](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2354827/episodes/19472212)**
Ian & Keith
*(with thanks to Scott Russell for joining us)
*Reply any time — we read everything.*
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