Arsenal v Man City. The return of the demon after a 2 year banishment

 

By Tony Attwood

Stuart Attwell is being allowed back to referee an Arsenal match for the first time in two years. 

The last time Attwell came to oversee an Arsenal game, Mikel Arteta was so outraged by the referee, he spoke about the referee’s performance in a TV interview.

Instantly, the FA flew into action and instead of investigating the appalling behaviour of the refereeee, banning the referee for life, and ordering the replaying of the match, they charged the Arsenal manager with insulting the match officials and saying things that were detrimental to the game and bringing it into disrepute.

It was an action that spurred Untold into expanding its coverage of referees, moving beyond focusing on tackles and fouls, and now showing how some referees favoured the home teams, others away teams and how overall which ref a club gets has an undue effect on the result.   Of course, I don’t know, but maybe the world of officialdom read or heard about something along those lines and backed down.   The charges were dismissed and the referee was effectively banned from Arsenal games. 

Until now.  

With all the media attention on the refereeing, the PGMO didn’t appoint Attwell to an Arsenal game throughout 2024, nor 2025…  up until now. But perhaps it’s felt that it’s been long enough, and the referee will take on a big game again.  He must know we are watching and will report afterwards.

But of course, by deliberately having so few referees on its roster, PGMO ultimately had to bring this referee back – it is all part of the nonsense of the way in which PGMO works.  The obvious rule – each ref only seeing each team twice a season at most (once for one of their home games and once for an away game) is never even debated, yet it would obviously cut down on arguments about referee bias.

This season, Stuart Atwell has overseen three games, and we can again see the variation between referees.  Taking (I must stress) just this season’s data, he is seeing 20 fouls a game.  Simon Hooper is seeing over 30 fouls per game!   Yet both men are refereeing Premier League matches!   Attwell is getting on for six yellow cards a game, while Oliver is averaging one yellow card per game.  And PGMOI think this is fine.   And the media don’t think it is worth a mention!

But it is when we come to the results of Attwell’s games that things get really spooky.  Last season 26.3% of his games were home wins, 47.4% of his games were away wins and the remaining 26.3% of his games were draws.

And it doesn’t look as if anyone at PGMO has given him any sort of retraining as this season out of his three games, one has been a home win, one an away, and one a draw.

Of course, three games is hardly enough to measure a referee on, although we can say that the early results don’t look too hopeful, but yet again we can say perfectly clearly and without fear of logical contradiction, which referee Arsenal get has a major impact on the result of the match.

And to give just one simple example of this without boring you with going over the same stats over and over again, last season John Brooks, across 16 Premier League games, saw 68.8% of those games as home wins, 12.5% as away wins and 18.8% as draws.   Thus showing once more (and really we have shown this so often that I’d agree there is no point in showing it once more) that the result a club gets is as much to do with which referee oversees the game, as anything else.

And yes, I know I go on and on and on about this, but it is so blindingly obvious that referees in the most popular league in the world should not have such different interpretations of the rules that one has to ask why the media won’t pick up on these figures.

I can only assume, and yes it is an assumption only, that PGMO has told journalist and their publications that if they do focus on these outrageous disparities in terms of referee decision making, they will lose all their privileges in terms of free seats, a nice desk and computer to type on, refreshments and the chance to interview players (but never ever the referee, as they do in Germany.)

Thus, the media won’t touch this subject and in my view, the viewing public is thus utterly misled.

Of course, I can’t blame commentators for this – they have their jobs, which they obviously enjoy and breaking the “don’t mention the ref” rule more than once or twice would lose them their job.   And really, if your last job was writing or speaking reports on football matches, what on earth could you do after that?