Under Review: The Video Assistant Referee and Referees’ Professional Role Identity

The introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has fundamentally altered decision-making in professional soccer. While initially implemented to enhance fairness and support professional soccer referees, VAR has made their professional role a highly debated topic in public discourse. Several stakeholder groups, e.g., fans, coaches, players, and media representatives, have raised concerns about the VAR, questioning soccer referees’ authority, autonomy, and decision-making ability. Therefore, this study draws on role identity theory and investigates how the perceptions of stakeholders in professional soccer about the VAR as an information system may potentially threaten professional soccer referees’ role identity. We use publicly available data to examine how external perceptions influence the professional role of referees. In doing so, we contextualize role identity theory within professional sports and enhance our understanding of how different external actors may influence the (re)construction of professional role identity in highly public and institutionalized environments.