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By Tony Attwood
The data used throughout this article is drawn from WhoScored’s referees statistics which you can find here.
In yesterday’s pre-match post we highlighted the fact that this referee was disproportionately friendly to away teams for reasons we could not explain.
We also suggested this has been going on for years, but instead of PGMO working with referees to overcome their biases, nothing happened, at least as far as we know (what with PGMO being an ultra-secretive organisation). The refs it seems were left to their own devices.
C Kavanagh was one such ref, as we indicated before yesterday’s match. With this ref away teams consistently get fewer fouls given against them and fewer yellow cards given against. Of course this effect could be overcome if each team got Mr Kavanagh once at home and once away during a season, but such an approach seems completely beyond PGMO to organise.
This contrasts dramatically with the fact that two seasons ago the top six referees (as in the referees that are given the most PL games by PGMO) were all seeing football matches for which the majority of results – in fact the big majority of results, were home wins.
Look at the figures for referees in 2022/23 and you will see,,,
| Referee | Games | HomeWin% | AwayWin% | Draw% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stuart Attwell | 25 | 72.0 | 12.0 | 16.0 |
| Robert Jones | 26 | 65.4 | 26.9 | 7.7 |
| Peter Bankes | 21 | 61.9 | 4.8 | 33.3 |
Look at the figures now for this year and for the most used referees the majority of results in two cases are away wins and in one case a draw. And indeed if we look at Chris Kavanagh’s results almost three-quarters of his games end as draws!!!
2024/25
| Referee | Games | HomeWin% | AwayWin% | Draw% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Taylor | 19 | 15.8 | 57.9 | 26.3 |
| Michael Oliver | 16 | 25.0 | 43.8 | 31.3 |
| Chris Kavanagh | 15 | 6.7 | 20.0 | 73.3 |
Now there are two ways of looking at this. One is that it is all pure chance. But that view is pushed to the limits by the fact that yesterday’s ref has overseen 15 games and 11 of them have been draws!
Of course, I am not in any way suggesting that someone out there is telling the referee “This one has to be a draw because we want Liverpool to win the league.” That might be true but I have no evidence for that.
But what I am saying is that while the statistics in anything can vary a little in the normal way – a variation among results of this magnitude for any referee looks very suspicious.
And when we have the situation in which the three most used referees all change their results from one season to the next, and no one says a word about it, then surely we are entitled to ask questions.
Now one of the answers that is given to this is that “it is the luck of the draw”, suggesting that referees might see a run of away wins or a run of draws, and then it all changes, because that is pure chance.
But if you look at anything in the real world described in statistics, you will see that it never works like that. There are patterns in all aspects of the world, and that is what scientists look at – the patterns.
Now I am not sayinging that someone offered a load of money to yesterday’s referee to throw the match because clearly I don’t have the evidence. All I have are statistics, and as I have said many times before, I absolutely do not accept that “you can prove anything with statistics.” You can’t prove that gravity only exists on Tuesdays, or that one day in this session of Parliament the Prime Minister will answer questions standing on his head.
Likewise you can’t prove that people in Britain have an equal chance of being left or right-handed, quite simply because a) the level of left-handedness is measured at about 10% and constant, and b) there is a clear genetic explanation as to why some people are left-handed and some right-handed.
Now I can’t prove there is something fishy with the refereeing of Chris Kavanagh but the results that his matches have this season been truly weird. If you insist it is all down to chance then I can’t stop you from believing that but just consider this. In 15 games he has seen one home win, three away wins and 11 draws.
Compare that with Darren Bond – seven of his nine games in charge have been home wins, two have been away wins.
60 games in the PL this season have been draws out of 214 matches. That is 28%. The figures for Chris Kavanagh is 73%.
In short which referee a club gets, has a major effect on the result.
While many of the referees are delivering results in line with the average, this sort of discrepancy is starting to crop up. It does not mean the matches are fixed, but it does suggest something very curious is going on, and this curiosity needs to be investigated. Just as university researchers explored why Preier League football generated so many more home wins than away wins. That was explored and the reason was found through serious research. And yes, it seems referees are influenced by extraneous factors which they should not be.
But nothing was done, as a result of those findings, and now we have another issue, with nothing being done once again.
And I stress this does not mean we are looking for all referees slavishly to be part of the norm when it comes to home wins, away wins and draws, but rather we need a fulsome investigation into why some referees see virtually nothing but draws, while some see almost nothing but home wins and some see almost nothing but away wins.
Any reasonable organisation running refereeing would look into this. Any reasonable and moderately intelligent journalist would investigate too. The fact that this does not happen and that virtually the only place you will see these figures is here must tell us something.
And of course you say that we are people with a fetish about referees and statistics. Or you can consider this point seriously in the way journalists abectly fail to do.
