By Sir Hardly Anyone
For today’s Arsenal game, 31 August 2026 the officials are
Referee: Jarred Gillett
Assistants: Neil Davies, Steve Meredith
Fourth official: Sam Barrott
VAR: James Bell
Assistant VAR: Nick Hopton
Jarred Gillet made 22 appearances in the PL last season making him the seventh most experienced referee in the least last season.
However he saw the second lowest number of fouls per games. Players are most likely very aware of this and know that he doesn’t call fouls,l primarily because many tackles that are seen by other referees as fouls are not seen as fouls by this referee.
And yet despite this finding, what we also see in that he gives a high number of penalties per game. Only three referees see more. However we don’t include penalties in our analysis since the number per game is obviously small, and thus a minor change can be seen as a huge difference in the statitics. (To be clear, a referee seeing two penalties in a game is seeing 100% more penalties than a referee who only sees one referee – which looks like a major difference, but still is just one foul in the area).
But we do include yellow cards and here we see a referee that is low in the yellow card numbers. Only two referees in our list show fewer yellow cards per game.
As in previous years our data comes from Who Scored, and these figures relate of course to last season. You can find all the raw data we have used, through that link.
| Referee | Games | Fouls pg | Fouls/Tackles | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Taylor | 31 | 20.48 | 0.59 | 3.94 |
| Chris Kavanagh | 30 | 22.30 | 0.68 | 4.07 |
| Michael Oliver | 29 | 22.93 | 0.65 | 3.03 |
| Stuart Attwell | 25 | 21.68 | 0.67 | 4.60 |
| Samuel Barrott | 24 | 19.38 | 0.60 | 3.71 |
| Darren England | 23 | 22.04 | 0.71 | 4.30 |
| Peter Bankes | 22 | 22.45 | 0.66 | 3.82 |
| Jrred Gillett | 22 | 19.77 | 0.53 | 3.59 |
| Simon Hooper | 15 | 23.33 | 0.65 | 4.00 |
| Andy Madley | 21 | 22.86 | 0.74 | 3.24 |
| VARIATION | 20% | 34% | 42% |
Of course the question as always is, does this matter? Does it matter that one referee persistently sees more fouls, gives out more cards, blows for more penalties than others? After all they are all human.
We argue that yes it does matter not just because we want all clubs to be treated the same, but also because players and managers know how each referee behaves and so varies their playing style according to which referee they have. And it should not be like that..
To see how much variation there is here in each column we take the highest number (and remember these are all per game) and divide it by the lowest number. So if one referee saw an average of 24 fouls per game and another saw 18 fouls per game we would divide 24 by 18 and get a variation of 33% Which is to say that the ref seeing 24 fouls per game is seeing on average, across all the games noted, seeing 33% more fouls than the referee seeing the lowest number.
Now we must remember this is not just for one game – this is across all the games from last season. So we can say the number of fouls per game varies by 20% depending on the referee.
In short the way each game goes does depend to some extent on which referee is overseeing the game, and so any manager who is doing his job, will be instructing his players to play in a way that takes into account the behaviour of this referee.
But worse, it is possible (and I stress no more than that) that a club that is known for fouling might be deliberately given a referee who punishes every foul on the field, in order to give that team a hard game. Or that team might get a referee who is “easy” on fouls, so they get away with a lot more fouls. Either way, that is not how it should be..
