06 July 2026
By Emma Young
As the World Cup continues, there have been controversies over some refereeing decisions and even allegations of bias. No matter the football competition or the country in which a match is being played, referees are obliged to follow a common set of rules, which are designed to ensure neutrality and uniformity in their decision-making, note the authors of a recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics.
However, referees are human, and there is evidence that certain factors can influence their thinking, with work finding that decisions on red and yellow cards tend to favour home teams, for example. For their study, Desirè De Luca at the University of Calabria, Italy, and colleagues set out to explore whether major geopolitical events — in this case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine — might affect high-level football refereeing decisions, too.
The researchers first created a data set from official UEFA match reports and score sheets for 3,187 matches played in the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League between the 2015 and the 2024 season. A total of 2,184 of the matches were played before the start of the Russia–Ukraine war on 24 February 2022, and 1,003 came afterwards. For each match, the researchers noted the nationalities of the players and referee, as well as who received any red or yellow cards or had fouls awarded against them.
Referees are assigned by UEFA's central Referees Committee using strict criteria aimed at ensuring neutrality in a match, the team notes. However, when they compared data from before and after the outbreak of the war, they noted a distinct difference. Though Russian players were no more likely to receive a yellow card after 24 February 2022, compared with before, they were 34% more likely to be given a red card. Red cards are rare. But, given that the player is then sent off, and cannot be substituted, this difference for Russian players is meaningful, the researchers note.
Overall, these results suggest that while the outbreak of war didn't change how referees punished more minor rule infringements, when it came to decisions that involved the highest level of personal discretion, and the most severe sanction, they did. The team did not see any difference for Ukrainian players, so the change did not seem to reflect any general 'anti-war' referee sentiment, they add.
The team then looked at whether referee nationality was linked to the changes in red-card decision-making in relation to Russian players. They found that German, Polish, and Turkish referees didn't alter their red card behaviour after the outbreak of war. The data on Ukrainian referees was not clear-cut. However, English, Italian, and French referees were more likely to give red cards to Russians after the war began. The finding that the red shift was mostly explained by decisions from referees from some countries that publicly aligned themselves with Ukraine suggests that geopolitical differences may have influenced their behaviour, they write.
"Geopolitical conflicts are increasingly recognised as factors that can shape individual behaviour even within formally neutral and highly regulated environments," the team notes. Understanding whether and how these biases arise is crucial for understanding the broader impact of political conflict on individual behaviour, they add. This new work suggests that even referees in tightly regulated international sports competitions are not immune.
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/do-geopolitical-events-affect-red-card-decisions(accessed 13.7.26)
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