- Football now has a gigantic problem: why can ManC hve their case heard in secret?
- Newspaper delves into schizophrenia and the issue of cheating in football
By Tony Attwood
The internet is awash with articles that suggest that throughout last season Manchester City were refereed differently from other clubs.
And the point is not so much whether you look at videos of games and find the suggestion of odd refereeing decisions valid or not, but rather that the whole of professional refereeing in the Premier League has now been utterly undermined not by these videos as by the silence of the authorities and the mass media. Indeed even the statistical analysis that suggests there is something amiss has been swept aside.
But if you don’t want to plough through loads of statistics just go to this page and you will see some refs, across a season, are giving out ten times as many penalties per game as others. Then you might note that some refs oversee twice as many away wins in the Premier League as others… and so on. And all these stats take into account the number of games the refs see and show that some refs have a propensity to see things in one way, and some another.
At the same time there are multiple videos out there showing referees making mistakes when overseeing individual games in which certain teams do seem to suffer somewhat. Are the refs incompetent or biased against Arsenal? Whatever the answer, it is unpleasant for what is supposed to be the biggest and best league in the world to have such suggestions made, and to refuse to produce the data which could answer those issues.
Of course it must be accepted that yes, referees make mistakes and referees are human and thus inconsistent, but such statements don’t actually prove that referees are biased in favour of, or against, certain clubs. But those figures (this link is to last season’s stats in full) show that even when we only include refs who oversee (for example) over 20 PL games a season, some refs are twice as likely to oversee home wins as others. And that seems odd, to say the least.
In short, which ref a club gets, has an influence on what the result will be. Which might tempt an unscrupulous club to do all it can to get referee X instead of refere Y. Of course PGMO would deny it could ever be influenced in such a way, but when we look at the way different referees get different results, that argument starts to lose, at least a spot of their validity.
What we have to conclude is that either refs are being given matches to handle which fit their prejudice, or their prejudice influences the results. And I am not saying every ref should see 50% home wins, 25% away win and 25% draw, or whatever the average figures are. I am saying that we should NOT be able to see who the ref is and say “the chances are it will be an away win” because of the ref. But the fact is, if we take a look at the ref and his previous results, we can sometimes get a clear indication of what might happen.
This bias is something that lives on, season after season in what is supposed to be the top league in the world, and yet it is never mentioned by the media. Yet before a match the media could say, “The ref is Mr X and we know that almost half of his games last season were away wins.” That would alert Mr Jones to the fact that we know the stats and we are watching. It would make him more alert.
But because the subject is never mentioned and the media join with the refs in never talking about even unconscious referee bias, nothing is done and the situation remains. Some refs oversee many more away wins than others, etc etc.
Now I suspect (but again have no evidence to back this up) that the reason for this “never mention” approach is because PGMO and/or the League have put pressure on the mass media not to talk about this issue, for fear or reducing TV audiences, which can happen once people understand that games might be influenced by who the referee is.
And of course the same worry has now surfaced in relation to current Manchester City debate. Just imagine how tainted the PL would look if the media took hold of the referee bias story at the same time.
Worse, if you then throw in the fact that some PL referees can get to see the same club five times in a season, (whereas it would be easy to ensure that no ref gets to oversee the same club more than once at home and once away each season), you can see why we suggest that who the ref is might affect the result in some games. It would be so easy for the League and PGMO to ensure that there could be no suggestion that there is no bias. That they don’t, doesn’t prove there is bias, but leaves us wondering why a) they don’t take such measures, and b) they are so incredibly secretive at PGMO.
Now all that has been talked about in the past of course. But today we have the stats that show us that there has been something odd going on. It doesn’t prove bias or fixing, but it is “odd”.
And at this point you perhaps can see why the story that Manchester City “have been found guilty of the vast majority of more than a hundred charges related to breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules,” has possibly been kept so quiet for so long. For that story also has sat in the background, and no one has seemed interested in touching it.
So, imagine a story that affects a number of clubs in the league – a story that suggests there is something rather fishy about the way Premier League matches are refereed, (perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously) and how which referee a club gets can (again maybe subconsciously) affect the result. A story that shows that some regular referees see, across an entire season, see 33% of the Premier League games they referee as home wins, while other referees see 66% of their games as home wins – which does seem a bit odd. Not proof of anything wrong, but when that result turns up in a league which keeps most referee stats rather quiet, it can make one think.
Mix that scenario up with the notion (unproven again) that referees can be perceived to be bending over to be helpful to one particular club, and how some referees might see the same team five times in a season, instead of the maximum of two that we have so long advocated, and we start to think, “why not take these basic precautionary steps?”
To be clear, it doesn’t mean that refs are bent or matches fixed, but it suggests that the basic steps that could be taken at no cost, which would make match fixing ever more difficult, are not being taken. And then one naturally asks why are these steps not taken.
Now because PGMO don’t have a website or a press office, and because most media don’t really write or talk about referees much, we can’t ask those questions, and so once again we are simply left asking the one question: “why?”
