Bundesliga

• Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today unveiled its first product under the new EA SPORTS FC™ brand, EA SPORTS FC 24, launching worldwide on September 29th, 2023.
• Welcome to the Club.”
  “This is a massive moment,” David Jackson, VP of Brand, EA SPORTS FC said.
• “EA SPORTS FC is the world’s biggest football club, with a community of fans that already spans more than 150 million.
• EA Play Pro members will enjoy unlimited access to the EA Play Pro Edition** of the game – including Ultimate edition content – starting September 22.

• Second funding round triples the investments of the first round, totaling €4 million compared to the initial €1.3 million
  Munich, June 22, 2023 – Tradar, the first European Neo-Sports Broker, has successfully concluded a new funding round, raising €4 million.
• This investment triples the amount of the initial round, which amounted to €1.3 million.
• With this latest influx of capital, the total funding raised by Tradar since its inception now exceeds €5 million.
• The round was led by a group of business angels and investors from the football and sports industry, indicating the growing interest in this innovative platform.

• Sports fans often think the ref is biased against their team – penalising them for the very same actions the other side is getting away with.
• The honest answer is probably not – despite most professional sporting bodies regularly rejecting claims of bias.
• In fact, referee bias has been reported in pretty much every aspect of most sports, including the use of yellow cards, red cards and penalty kicks.

Confirmation bias is real

• This tendency – known as confirmation bias – has its uses.
• It lets us make quick decisions when we don’t have the time to consider all the evidence.
• However, confirmation bias can also be problematic.
• Given exactly the same prints, but primed to look for evidence that the fingerprints didn’t match, their judgement changed.

Expectations influence outcomes

• Even if not consciously biased, they will have expectations about how players and teams will perform, and there is evidence that this influences their judgements.
• We suspect those expectations are one reason dominant teams and players tend to have close calls go their way.
• Referees expect to see some players pull off moves that bring them close to infringing but which don’t cross that line.

Refs aren’t superhuman

• And if referees do have these kinds of expectations, it would be very difficult for them to factor these out of their decision making.
• The fingerprint experts didn’t intend to tailor their judgements to suit the views they’d been primed to hold.
• Further, they made their judgements under calm laboratory conditions, with the evidence in front of them and plenty of time and equipment to examine and consider it.
• Referees would need to be superhuman to be immune to these dangers.

• NEW YORK, April 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- International Soccer Academy , the top soccer academy that empowers American youth soccer talents to play in Europe, is proud to announce a collaboration with the prestigious FC Bayern Munich , one of the world's most successful sports organizations to identify top youth soccer players in the USA.
• "We are honored to team up with FC Bayern," said International Soccer Academy's Diane Scavuzzo.
• "We have already started working closely with FC Bayern Munich to identify talented youth soccer players born in 2007 and 2008 for the elite FC Bayern Global Academy launching this fall," said Eddie Loewen, cofounder of International Soccer Academy.
• "We are honored to team up with FC Bayern," said International Soccer Academy cofounder Diane Scavuzzo.