By Global Sports & Analytics Desk
Published: October 24, 2023
Main Facts
Modern sports technology was designed to eliminate human error, ensuring absolute fairness on the field of play. Yet, a recent high-stakes match between the United States men’s national soccer team and Bosnia and Herzegovina has reignited a fierce global debate regarding the unintended consequences of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system. During the match, a critical penalty—culminating in a controversial red card—was assessed against a U.S. player not by the on-field referee, but through the intervention of the video review official.
The incident has triggered widespread outrage among fans, analysts, and players, casting a harsh spotlight on how technology is utilized in high-performance athletics. While video review systems provide multiple camera angles, high-definition clarity, and split-second precision for determining offsides or ball-tracking, they also introduce a deeply flawed psychological variable into officiating: slow motion.
Decades of cognitive and behavioral research demonstrate that altering the speed of a video dramatically skews human perception. Specifically, reviewing dynamic, high-speed athletic collisions in slow motion systematically leads officials—and viewers—to perceive actions as more intentional, more premeditated, and consequently, more severe. As athletic organizations race to integrate more technology into officiating, sports scientists are asking an uncomfortable question: Are we substituting raw human bias for a technological bias that makes ordinary game-speed contact look like calculated malice?
Chronology
To understand how modern soccer officiating reached this crossroads, it is necessary to examine the timeline of technological integration, the specific sequence of events during the U.S. versus Bosnia and Herzegovina fixture, and the psychological timeline of perceptual distortion.
- Pre-2018 (The Rise of VAR): Association football slowly introduces video technology to combat glaring refereeing errors. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) officially incorporates VAR into the Laws of the Game in 2018, deploying it at the FIFA World Cup in Russia to monitor goals, penalty decisions, red card incidents, and mistaken identity.
- The Match Day Incident: During the international friendly match between the U.S. men’s soccer team and Bosnia and Herzegovina, a tense physical challenge occurs in the heat of play. The on-field referee initially allows play to continue, missing or judging the contact as a standard challenge.
- The VAR Intervention: Sitting in a remote control room, the video review official halts the flow of the game. Utilizing multiple camera feeds, the VAR isolates the contact, rewinds the footage, and switches the playback to slow motion.
- The Escalation to a Red Card: Influenced by the magnified, drawn-out perspective of the slow-motion replay, the video official advises the head referee to review the monitor. The on-field referee views the slowed footage, reinterprets the player’s kinetic movement as deliberate, and upgrades the ruling to a severe red card, stunning the U.S. side and shifting the momentum of the game.
- The Immediate Aftermath and Public Outcry: Fans and commentators instantly cry foul. Social media lights up with comparisons to similar tackles involving star players from other nations that went unpunished, while psychologists and sports researchers point to the exact mechanism that caused the harsh ruling: the slow-motion cognitive trap.
Supporting Data and Psychological Science
The controversy surrounding the U.S. match is not an isolated anomaly; it is the predictable outcome of human psychology interacting with temporal manipulation. When humans evaluate harm, the attribution of intent is paramount. We naturally process accidents differently than calculated acts of aggression. However, scientific experiments reveal that slow motion fundamentally breaks our internal calculator for intentionality.
The Science of Slow-Motion Bias
In a landmark 2016 study, researchers Eugene M. Caruso, Zachary C. Burns, and Benjamin A. Converse investigated how video speed affects judgments of intent.
- The Robbery and Shooting Study: The researchers first examined a real surveillance video capturing a robbery and shooting. When participants viewed the footage in slow motion, they consistently rated the perpetrator’s intent to kill significantly higher than participants who watched the exact same footage at real-time, full speed.
- The American Football Study: Expanding their research into athletics, Caruso and colleagues analyzed potential penalties in football. Again, slow motion led evaluators to judge defensive contact as more deliberate and aggressive. The researchers argued that slow motion creates an illusion of time: viewers subconsciously assume that because an event takes longer to unfold on screen, the perpetrator had extended time to recognize the impending harm, alter their trajectory, and choose a safer path. In reality, at full speed, the entire sequence occurs in milliseconds—far too fast for human neuromuscular adjustment.
Application to Association Football (Soccer)
These findings translate directly to soccer, where physical challenges happen in tight spaces at high velocities.
- Schütz et al. (2026): Recent studies on video speed and intention attribution continue to validate that decelerating visual data artificially inflates the observer’s perception of premeditation.
- Spitz et al. (2018): In a crucial study focusing specifically on soccer, researchers evaluated real, certified soccer referees as they assessed the seriousness of fouls shown at both full speed and in slow motion. The results were unequivocal: when officials watched incidents in slow motion, they consistently judged the penalties to be significantly more severe. In practical terms, slow motion made referees far more likely to brandish a red card rather than a yellow card—precisely the fate suffered by the U.S. player in the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Official Responses and Institutional Dilemmas
The governing bodies of international soccer, including FIFA and IFAB, face a monumental dilemma. On one hand, stakeholders demand absolute accuracy. Errors on offsides, goal-line incidents, and clear penalty box fouls can alter millions of dollars in revenue, tournament standings, and national prestige. VAR was introduced precisely to catch these errors.
However, the protocol governing VAR leaves massive room for interpretation, particularly regarding the instruction to review "serious foul play."
- The IFAB Protocol: Current guidelines permit VAR intervention for "clear and obvious errors" regarding red card incidents. Yet, the protocol fails to mandate at what speed the referee must evaluate the contact.
- The Institutional Silence: Referees and referee associations have historically resisted admitting that technological tools can induce bias. To question the integrity or perceptual accuracy of slow-motion review is to question the entire architecture of modern video-assisted officiating.
- The Subjectivity Crisis: As veteran sports officials rely increasingly on slow-motion replays, they are unwittingly trapping themselves in an artificial reality. A tackle that looks reckless, malicious, and entirely avoidable at 10% speed was often an unavoidable, split-second kinetic collision when experienced at 100% human speed on a grass pitch.
Referees find themselves caught between two impossible standards: if they rely solely on full speed, they are accused of missing details; if they rely on slow motion, they fall victim to the cognitive bias of perceived intent.
Implications for the Future of Sports Officiating
The fallout from the U.S. versus Bosnia and Herzegovina match extends far beyond a single international friendly or a disputed red card. It signals an urgent need for sports leagues worldwide to reevaluate how technology serves the game.
1. The Perennial Bias of Fan Perception
Compounding the technological issue is a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as hostile media effect or partisan perception. As famously demonstrated by psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril in their classic 1954 study ("They Saw a Game"), spectators view athletic contests through a deeply biased lens. Fans consistently believe that referees are biased against their team, that their own players commit fewer fouls, and that opposing infractions go unpunished.
The author of this report admits to feeling the sting of referee bias during the U.S. match. Yet, psychological science reminds us that personal observation in sports is inherently compromised by tribal loyalty. When partisan emotion combines with flawed technological processing, public trust in officiating plummets.
2. Policy Recommendations for Video Review
If sports organizations wish to preserve the flow, spirit, and fairness of soccer, structural reforms regarding video review are urgently required:
- Mandatory Full-Speed Baseline: Referees should be legally required to view any contested foul at least once at full speed before looking at slow-motion angles. This anchors the official’s baseline perception in the actual reality experienced by the players on the field.
- Redefining "Serious Foul Play": IFAB must issue clearer directives distinguishing between the outcome of a collision and the intent of the player, explicitly warning officials against the slow-motion illusion of time and premeditation.
- Transparency in the Booth: Similar to rugby union or American football’s replay center broadcasts, allowing fans and television audiences to hear the communication between the on-field referee and the VAR booth would demystify the decision-making process and restore faith in the system.
Conclusion
Technology was meant to bring clarity to the beautiful game, but in the case of the U.S. men’s soccer team and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it magnified a psychological illusion. Until sports governing bodies account for the cognitive distortions of slow motion, players will continue to be penalized not for what they actually did in the breathless reality of the match, but for how an artificial replay makes their actions look in slow motion. Until then, players, coaches, and fans alike will have every right to keep calling foul.
References
- Caruso, E. M., Burns, Z. C., & Converse, B. A. (2016). Slow motion increases perceived intent. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(33), 9250-9255.
- Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game; a case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 129.
- Schütz, L. M., Betsch, T., & Plessner, H. (2026). The impact of video speed on intention attribution. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 103140.
- Spitz, J., Moors, P., Wagemans, J., & Helsen, W. F. (2018). The impact of video speed on the decision-making process of sports officials. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3(1), 16.
