Determining the Effects of IT on the Quality of Iran Pro League Referees’ Performance

In recent years, the utilization of Information Technology (IT) in various sportive areas, especially football, has increased. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effects of IT on the quality of Iran Pro League (The highest division of professional football in Iran) referees' performance. The research design of the present study is descriptive-correlational. The statistical population included 200 referees working in Iran Pro League in 2017 and it is a finite population (N=20). The questionnaires of accepting and applying IT as well as the Supervision and Monitoring form were used to measure the studied variables in the research. The Sign test was used for comparing the referees' performances before and after utilizing IT. The multivariate regression analysis was used for investigating the relationships and SPSS software version 23 was used to analyze the results. The significance level was considered P<0.05. The results of this research showed that the performance difference among referees before and after utilizing IT is significant (Sig=0.001). Also, the findings suggest that there is a positive and significant relationship between the utilization of IT and the quality of referees' performance (Sig=0.001). Among the subscales of IT, the highest share of clarification belongs to the subscale of willingness of applying IT with regression coefficient 0.567 and other subscales like understanding the easiness of applying IT (0.531), the attitude towards IT (0.460), understanding the usefulness of IT (0.416) and the utilization of IT (0.388) follow, respectively. Based on the results of the research, the authorities of the referee committee are advised to utilize the instructions related to the utilization of IT for decreasing referees' mistakes.