Referee Review 2012/3: Reading – 17 wrong decisions per game!!!

By Walter Broeckx

This article is part of the series of the Referee Review 2013. You can find links to earlier articles on the bottom of this article.

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In this part of the series we have a look at each team and see how the bias panned out for each team. This is based on the decisions themselves without putting any weight on each decision. A total table will be published at the end of this series and then you can compare each team with the other teams.

And it will be an interesting table I can assure you of that.

First we are providing a table for each team highlighting each type of decision. This gives the totals as for when the team in the article got a favourable decision and when they got it against them.

If the traditional mantra, “it all evens out at the end of the season” is true it should show in these statistics – and indeed for some clubs we have already reviewed, that is the case.

But as I said, in the table we just show the decisions as a decision and we didn’t put any weight on the decisions. That is something for later on. Now we just take each decision at the same value, which is of course not saying all because a wrong penalty call is a bit more important than a wrong throw in decision.

But now let us move to the sixth team in our survey:  Reading.

The bad thing about Reading is that we only did 10 of their games and that is just over 26% of their games. The lowest number of them all. So the most difficult set of numbers to judge. But we will try anyway.

In the second column we see the type of decision. And in the column “favoured” we see how many decisions favoured Wigan when we reviewed them. And in the column “Penalised” we see how many times a wrong decision went against them.  The total swing is the difference between the favoured decisions and the penalised decisions.

A negative number in this column means that the total was against the team and a positive number means that the total decisions was in their favour.

In the last column we see the average swing per game, based on the games we reviewed. And this gives an indication on how many decisions went against a team or were in favour of a team. The lower the number the lower number of decisions that were wrong. And a positive number indicates that in each game they get some decisions in their favour and a negative indicates how many decisions the team has to overcome.

We had a total of 168 wrong decisions in the 10 games we did with Reading.  That is more than 16 wrong decisions per game, almost 17. This is the most disgraceful number I have ever seen. 17 wrong decisions on average each game. Terrible. Completely unacceptable.

Of those 168 wrong decisions we had 80 in their favour and 88 going against them. The difference is 8 decisions gong against Reading. So that is a bit of good news one could say. The level of the refereings was terrible in general but equally bad for both sides. A small consolation. It means that we had just under 1 decisions going against them on average per game. But then again with such a low level of refereeing standards in their games, nobody deserves this shit.

If we first look at the decisions that went in their favour we see that this is only for advantage,  free kicks, yellow and red cards that went their way. And both with just 1 decisions difference each time. Apart from the yellow cards where the advantage was a bit bigger.

There was no difference when we look at the corners and throw in decisions. But all the others had a negative bias against Reading. The goals are the worst part in fact. No wrong awarded goals in their favour but 3 going against them.  When we look at the penalties we see that 1 only wrongly in their favour but 3 going against them.

Reading surely didn’t get it their way and maybe it is no surprise they went down again if we look at these numbers.  1 decision per game going against you doesn’t look that much of a deal. But when we look at the goals and penalties going against you it looks as if they had almost one goal or penalty going against them per game. And that is a big handicap to overcome.

But then again we have to be careful like I said before because we don’t have that many games to look at.

Earlier articles in the series of ref review for 2012/13

• 1. Who reviewed the games
• 2. What we did and what next
• 3. All the decisions in numbers
• 4. The first at times astonishing numbers
• 5. Home and away bias
• 6.  It all evens out in the end – Wigan last season
• 7.  West Ham: Life with a positive bias
• 8: West Brom and the Referees
• 9: Tottenham and the refs
• 10: Swansea City and a change this year
• 11: Sunderland, a positive bias
• 12: Stoke, where refereeing is different.
• 13: Southampton – how did they ever survive?