Enhancing Football Refereeing with AI: VARS and X-VARS for Assisted Decision-Making

In this abstract, we present the results of a human study exploring the dynamics of when to provide VARS assistance to referee. We investigate how referees' behavior and performance vary across four conditions: (1) no VARS assistance, (2) always VARS assistance, (3) VARS assistance provided only when the model is confident, and (4) VARS assistance available upon referee request. Each condition involved 20 referees, who evaluated 25 multi-view videos of the same football action captured from three perspectives. For each video, referees were tasked with determining whether a foul occurred and, if so, assessing its severity.