West Ham at home, Arsenal away, referee bias. How the figures compare

 

By Bulldog Drummond

West Ham United v Arsenal

• Why do West Ham get so few yellow cards?
• West Ham v Arsenal: 2pm sunday. Fewer goals v More goals.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
13	West Ham United home	15	6	3	6	19	19	0	21
1	Arsenal away	15	11	2	2	30	11	19	35

 

This is a nice and easy comparison (taken from 11v11) to make in that each side has played 15 games – West Ham have 15 at home and garnered 21 points.  Arsenal have played the same number away and picked up 35 points.

In terms of rounded figures, looking at the goals Arsenal score getting on for twice as many goals away as West Ham do at home, while conceding just over half as many as West Ham.    Put this together and they will be playing for a 1-1 draw while Arsenal are playing for a 3-1 win, and being the team for whom scoring is fairly commonplace, are likely to come out on top.

But as we have regularly said, the league table itself is not always a perfect guide, which is why we look at the form of clubs over a smaller number of games, as the season progresses.

In general terms, West Ham are rising above themselves in recent games – here is the last six games league table…

 

Premier League Form (Last 6)

Pos	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1	Arsenal	6	5	1	0	20	6	14	16
2	Man City	6	5	1	0	16	4	12	16
3	Aston Villa	6	5	1	0	11	2	9	16
4	Newcastle	6	5	0	1	13	6	7	15
5	Brighton	6	3	2	1	13	7	6	11
6	Tottenham	6	3	2	1	11	7	4	11
7	West Ham	6	3	1	2	8	10	-2	10

 

So West Ham in better form than we might expect – and indeed West Ham had some bad results last calendar year.  So let’s look at this year and separate the home and way just over the last three and a half months which conveniently gives us six away games for Arsenal and six home games for West Ham United.

And now we see the difference is much reduced.  Arsenal still are performing the better of the two clubs but the gap is much narrower.

Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
Arsenal away	6	4	1	1	12	5	7	13
West Ham United home	6	3	2	1	10	7	3	11

 

And I would like to divert a little here from the focus on the West Ham game, because in preparing these tables (in this case with the help of TWTD) it becomes clear just how poor the away form is of clubs in the Premier League.   Indeed just looking at recent games only three clubs are really making much of their away performances: Manchester City, Arsenal and the re-born Aston Villa.  For the most part with other teams it is a case of winning just one or two out of six or seven games.

There have been 87 wins this season in the Premier League for away teams out of 296 games.  That is 29% of the Premier League games this season have been won by away teams.

Of course we wouldn’t expect individual referees to be reflecting this average of 29% of games being away wins, but what we have here are referees who have each overseen 16 plus games in the Premier League this season and we have one group who are seeing games in which the away wins are between a quarter and a half of the level we expect, while another group are seeing away wins to a level which are 10 to 15% more than we might expect.

 

Referee	Apps	HomeWin%	AwayWin%	Draw%
8.Peter Bankes	16	50.0	6.3	43.8
2.Simon Hooper	22	68.2	9.1	22.7
3.Stuart Attwell	21	66.7	14.3	19.0
18.Anthony Taylor	22	31.8	40.9	27.3
14.David Coote	16	37.5	43.8	18.8
15.Craig Pawson	18	33.3	44.4	22.2

 

Perhaps seeing one or two referees are a bit out of sync with the average is one thing, but having three of the senior referees overseeing very few away wins indeed, while another group seeing more away wins than home wins, is frankly, very odd indeed.

Certainly if I were a Premier League manager the first thing I would be doing before preparing the guys for each new game is check on who the referee is and where he stands in the home and away tables.

And the answer here is …. David Coote.   43.8% away wins.  OK that is encouraging for us, but it still doesn’t make this right.  I am not saying that each referee should follow the average exactly – of course not because it was Untold Arsenal that made so much of how the results changed during the pandemic, and why there were so many more away wins at that time.

What I am saying, as always, that this shows just how much some referees are affected by the crowd and how others are disaffected by the crowd.