Why do Arsenal get so many yellow cards for unspecified reasons?

By Tony Attwood

Last summer the Daily Telegraph did a set of projections for the forthcoming season, asking their football reporters (these days they call them their “football experts”) to predict the outcome of the season.  Arsenal were predicted to come first by Law, Dean, Edwards, and Zeqiri and  second by Burt and Bascombe, which you might think is not too bad a bit of guesswork.

But then Dean also suggested Tottenham would finish fourth, and Bascombe had Tottenham down as his surprise package, which I suppose they were, coming 17th, but that was not in the way he meant.  Edwards also said, “Tottenham Hotspur could also claim a top-four finish…”  And he had Manchester United finishing fourth as did Daniel Zeqiri.

Which suggests that maybe we should take journalists’ predictions with a pinch.   For the fact is that, as we know, injuries can destroy a season, and as we have deduced, some clubs can target certain others in terms of bad tackles.   

This latter point strongly suggests that clubs are increasingly using data concerning referees in their match preparations (which journalists still refuse to do).  For while in olden times most clubs wouldn’t know or bother about who the referee was until the game started, now there is as much thought about the referee and his ways before the match as there is about the opposition players.

To give one simple example – and here, as with all these figures, we only look at referees who oversaw 20 or more Premier League games last season, Robert Jones saw 24% more fouls than Simon Hooper.   That might well be understandable in one game where one of the teams is a club near the foot of the table, desperately hanging on for a draw, but across the whole season, that is extraordinary.

But it is not just the fouls themselves that give us strange figures.  An interesting measurement here is the ratio of fouls per tackle.   In this a ratio of 1.0 means every tackle is a foul.   A ratio of 0.5 means that half the tackles are fouls, and last season some of the lesser-used referees had astonishing figures in this regard.  For example, Lewis Smith who oversaw seven Premier League games last season, had a fouls per tackle ratio of 0.82.  Put another way more than eight out of every ten tackles he saw, he deemed to be a foul!

Compare this with Peter Banks whose ratio was 0.55, meaning that only fractionally over half of the tackles he saw were fouls.

And now, given that the clubs know in advance exactly who is refereeing each match and what his behaviour is like, you can see how clubs are having to adjust their team behaviour depending on the referee, which is not how it should be.

Then there is the case of penalties.  Some of the less experienced referees see penalty giving as a major part of their work.  Lewis Smith for example who oversaw seven PL games last season awarded a penalty more than once in every two games.   On the other hand Stuart Attwell gave a penalty only once in every ten games.  A 500% difference.

Yellow cards are very much at the whim of the referee too.   John Brooks gave out 5.38 yellows a game, while Anthony Taylor gave out just 2.87 per game – fewer than half the number of fellow ref Brooks. 

From all this, we can see why clubs now look very carefully at which referee they have for each game and then adjust their performance accordingly.   Or at least some do.

Chelsea picked up 99 yellow cards last season, which although an astonishingly high number, was actually an improvement on the 104 the season before.   And the reason for this is not too hard to find – Chelsea buy in multiple new players each season, so those players often don’t have the time to take on board just how weird and variable Premier League refereeing is.   

For in the official table of why clubs get cards (see here, and then scroll down to the second table) you will find a final column called “other” – a set of cards for which there is no explanation other than it is not for fouling, unprofessional conduct or diving.

What are they for?   We still don’t know and we have been asking for three years now.  But what we do know is that year after year Arsenal get hammered in terms of cards for “other rasons”.   Liverpool and Tottenham, we might note however, got under half the number of yellow cards for “other reasons” than Arsenal.