The referee who explained

A league trialled a rule requiring referees to announce the reason for every video review over the public address system. Complaints about officiating fell by more than half. The number of overturned decisions did not change.

What changed was what spectators could see. A review previously consisted of a pause, a screen, and a decision; the reasoning stayed inside the officials' headsets. The trial made the reasoning audible: which part of the incident was being examined, what the criterion was, and what the evidence showed. Crowds disagreed with plenty of conclusions and stopped believing that the conclusions were arbitrary.

This is a familiar result in any system that makes judgements. The acceptability of a decision depends on two separate things: whether people agree with it, and whether they can see how it was reached. Institutions reliably invest in the first and neglect the second, because improving accuracy feels like the serious work and explaining feels like public relations.

The trial had a second, unplanned consequence. Required to state the criterion aloud, officials became more consistent, because an announcement is a commitment and inconsistency between announcements is audible to everyone including the official. Several referees reported that they now ran the criterion through their head in the same order each time.

The league made the practice permanent. It also published the criteria in advance, which is the cheaper half of the reform and the one most often skipped: a decision explained against a published rule is checkable, while one explained against an unpublished rule is only better theatre.