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I read a study that examined the effect of direction of play, that is play proceeding to the official's right as opposed to play proceeding to the official's left, on the official's perception of fouls. While I have some concerns about how the study was conducted (the subjects were college students as opposed to licensed officials), what they did was take pictures of soccer challenges and presented them to the subjects. They also included mirror images of the pictures to make it appear that play was moving in the opposite direction.
What the study found was that we tend to penalize plays moving to the right more often than we penalize the same play moving to the left.
What the coaches may be noticing is our subconscious bias to not penalize plays moving toward that sideline. Since it has to do with movement in a particular direction, both teams can take advantage of it.
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