Pulibhed today by the Arsenal History Society
And on Untold
- Is there a regional bias over the way referees hand out cards?
- Six seasons of fouls and cards…. and possible referee bias
These last two articles on Untold, noted above, gave detailed statistical evidence showing that the way referees hand out cards is influenced not just by the action of the players but by which teams are involved. And Arsenal, above every team, do suffer as a result.
But as we have shown before, this is not the only reason that Arsenal need to be taking note of who the referee is in each match, for I am certain that by now, under Arteta’s guidance, the whole squad is aware they are playing the opposition and the referee.
So it will have been noted that the Premier League has announced that the referee is Simon Hooper. The assistants are Adrian Holmes and Simon Long. The fourth official is Jarred Gillett.VAR is overseen by Paul Tierney with Steve Meredith assisting.
And you can see at once that among the referees there is an amazing diversity of results. Two referees saw over half their matches as home wins. For another, it was only 18%. One referee saw fractionally under half of his games as away wins and yet two saw only a quarter of their matches as away victories. One saw over 40% as draws and two saw under 10% as draws.
If referees were all overseeing each match in the same way and matches were being handed out evenly, there would of course still be some diversity but there would be far less diversity in these numbers. But these are extraordinary numbers and they mean that although you can’t forecast exactly what the result will be from these figures; you can take a guess.
| Refeee | Games | Home win% | Away win% | Draw% |
| Peter Bankes | 23 | 56.5 | 34.8 | 8.7 |
| Simon Hooper | 24 | 50.0 | 25.0 | 25.0 |
| Andy Madley | 20 | 45.0 | 25.0 | 30.0 |
| Samuel Barrott | 23 | 43.5 | 47.8 | 8.7 |
| Craig Pawson | 22 | 40.9 | 31.8 | 27.3 |
| Robert Jones | 22 | 18.2 | 40.9 | 40.9 |
| Jarred Gillett | 16 | 37.5 | 50.0 | 12.5 |
As for Simon Hooper, Manchester United will love him on Sunday as he is a home win man – as we can see. He does give away wins, but he has the lowest percentage of away wins of the mainstream PGMO referees. You can decide if this is a pure coincidence or not.
And of course all the clubs know these figures – they pore over them before each game, warning their players able the foibles and expectations of the referees for their game. For Man U the instruction will be, “go for the win because this man is a home referee – he will help you and your fans as much as he can.” For Arsenal, it is, “keep everything fair and square, keep the fouling right down, and engage in absolutely no retaliation. Look good and clean to this ref, and you might stand a chance.
Now, the next factor we can see about this ref is that last season he awarded the lowest number of free kicks for fouls of any of the referees who saw four games or more – which effectively means almost all of them. He quite often just doesn’t see fouls. Some referees are awarding seven more fouls a game than he is. And that is on average.
But when he does see a foul, he waves a card – and if not for a foul, then for something else. At 4.67 cards a game, he is at the top of the list of all the referees who oversaw 20 games or more last season.
Now this sort of variation in refereeing may take many of our new recruits by surprise, because PGMO and the media have a very effective propaganda machine working that says that English referees are all fair and honourable and decent fellows.
And of course, I am not suggesting any of them is either bent or incompetent. I don’t know why there are such huge variations in the number of four and cards between refs in the Premier League: it could be chance, although that is stretching the notion of chance quite a bit, but still it could be.
Simon Hooper waved an amazing 112 yellow cards last season. Only Mr Oliver beat that with 113 and he had two extra league games to do this in. So one can only hope that Arteta has told the team, especially the newcomers, this guy waves the cards like you have never seen before. Don’t argue, run back the ten yards from the ball for a free kick against Arsenal, keep the tackles as clean as possible, and never once make eye contact with the man. You don’t know what that might lead to.
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