Arsenal are allegedly the dirtiest team in the Premier League. So what do the figures say?

By Tony Attwood

Arsenal have often been accused of being the dirtiest team in the Premier League, but one of the most interesting points about such accusations is that it is rarely accompanied by a comprehensive set of data.   Sometimes there is no data at all, other times we might see Arsenal’s number of yellow cards quoted, but without any comparison figures.   Thus, we might be told that Arsenal had a shocking 50 yellow cards in a season without knowing why this is shocking – in short what number of cards other clubs were given.

Now we also know that a couple of years ago, Arsenal suddenly got a whole rash of red cards one after the other.   And a lot of eyebrows were raised because the numbers not only seemed to be out of tune with Arsenal’s normal level of cards, but out of touch with what was happening to most other clubs.

So anyone seriously looking at the number of cards as a way of judging how dirty a team is, has to do a bit of comparison work across several seasons.

But to measure every parameter in this way would be time-consuming to undertake and tedious to read, and of course, because all the figures are out there, anyone can see the numbers anyway.

So what I have now tried to do is compare the number of fouls comitted and the number of yellow cards received in a season.   And I do this in response to the Daily Mirror which on 23 May 2023, ran an article in which they “looked at who has been the cleanest in the league and who has been the dirtiest in the season.”  If you saw the article, you might recall Arsenal did not come out well although, in common with other such articles, the full figures were not published.

To measure the concept of “dirty” we we only have three measures: fouls committed, yellow cards awarded, red cards awarded.

I’m not keen on red cards as a measure, first because the number is often quite low and second, one has to distinguish between a red awarded for two yellows (which can lead to offences being counted twice), and a red shown straight off to a player for some particularly bad action on the pitch.   Also, while the number of yellow cards tends to remain fairly stable for clubs, the number of reds does have a habit of wavering widely from one year to the next.   But of course, you can do your own research if you feel the award of reds can give meaningful information.

So, I have looked at the number of yellow cards and number of fouls committed, and seen not just the number of such events, but also the position that puts Arsenal in, in relation to other clubs.  For just saying Arsenal got 64 yellow cards doesn’t tell us much if we don’t know how many cards other clubs got.