Do players react to sanction changes? Evidence from the English Premier League

This paper evaluates the impact on three types of offences, red card fouls, yellow card fouls, and no-card fouls of Federation Internationale de Football Association's introduction of a rule change in 1998 by exploiting the competitive variation in English Premier League football games over two seasons. A key result of this paper is that as more offences became eligible for red cards, the number of red cards did not increase after the introduction of the new law. The results indicate that the relationship between non-red card fouls and many of their determinants appears to have changed significantly between the 1997-8 and 1998-9 seasons. The findings in the paper are consistent with the view that an increase in the severity of the sanction associated with a tackle from behind raised the number of no-card and yellow card fouls.