Fully-funded PhD: Evaluating football officiating decision support systems

Decision support systems assist decision makers in instances when information available for decision making is vast and beyond human information processing capabilities. The Video Assistant Referee is a decision support system that enhances the informational resources and data available to football referees, allowing them to make more informed judgments in complex and potentially match-defining situations. FIFA’s innovation department has several academic collaborations developing a broader decision support system for helping match officials increase the certainty of decision making and to explore the potential broader impact of its integration into referees’ working practices. This framework aims to establish a proof of concept for enhancing on-field performance that would not replace the experiential knowledge of referees but rather increase the depth of contextual knowledge and, in turn, reduce uncertainty and enhance transparency when making complex decisions. 

The project forms part of an exciting new research and innovation partnership between Manchester Metropolitan University and FIFA’s Innovation Department and aims to develop ongoing work on the decision support system. This is a full-time, funded PhD opportunity open to home students only.

Project aims and objectives

Football officials’ support systems represent a type of complex intervention and understanding how the system contributes to change and interacts with its context, and the wider dynamic system is of equal importance to a binary assessment of effectiveness. As such, the aim of this PhD programme is to comprehensively evaluate football officiating decision support systems.

Project Objectives

1. Identify aspects of newly developed football officiating decision support systems for evaluation.
2. Intervention development targeting components of the decision support systems.

3. Explore intervention feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness.