Introduction

A Google search for ‘sport science and athlete’ yields 50,200,000 results. In comparison, searching for ‘sport science and referee’ yields 26,200,000 results and ‘sport science and officiating’ yields only 243,000 results. This is not a rigorous comparison and does not account for how relevant each result is for the topics we’d like to compare, which is research on sports officials versus research on sports athletes. Nevertheless, it reflects what we know is true about these areas: there is far more research on athletes than there is on officials. In general this is not surprising when we consider the numbers: there are more athletes than there are officials. In other ways, however, the extent of the imbalance is surprising, given the impact that officials have on the outcome of contests.