Arsenal’s fouls dropped by 22% last season. Did it help?

By Tony Attwood

In general terms the teams that commit the most fouls in the PL are those seeking to avoid relegation, which is not surprising.  The teams that commit the fewest fouls are generally the teams that are pushing towards winning the league.

The league winner isn’t always the team with the lowest foul rate, but 40% of the time in the last ten years it has been the lowest fouling team.  Only once in the last ten years has a team committing over 400 fouls in a season, won the league (Leicester with 405 fouls).

In the table below the top ten PL fouling teams in the last ten years are shown.  Nine are the teams that of course have played in the PL for the last ten years – they have played more teams so they have committed more fouls.  The tenth is Southampton who are the seventh most fouling team in the PL in the last ten years, despite only playing nine of those ten seasons in the PL!

Finally, Leicester has been added as we are also looking at teams that have won the title in the last ten years.

Each club’s most fouling season is marked in red, and the least fouling in bold black.  These figures show the extraordinary change that we have been discussing in Arsenal’s tactics all summer.  Arsenal moved from their highest number of fouls of the last 10 seasons (2019/20) to their lowest (2020/21) in just one season.  A drop of 76 fouls from one season to the next!!!  That’s how you turn a team around.

As you can see, of the seven teams that have played all the last ten seasons Liverpool have committed the least fouls, and Arsenal the second least (with just 29 more, which can be accounted for entirely by the season and a half Mr Emery was in charge – no one told him about PGMO).

But then we moved from our worst fouling season (2019/20) to our best (2020/21) in which we had fewer fouls called against us than any of the other major teams.  This table shows clubs listed in the order of the number of fouls committed across the ten years.  *indicates the champions.

Team	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20	2020-21	Total
Liverpool	366	372	410	385	422	397	344	315	331*	396	3738
Arsenal	374	360	348	377	350	397	383	412	421	345	3767
Soton		382	443	468	416	424	416	420	450	426	3845
Man C	384*	443	394*	445	409	395	344*	328*	361	361*	3864
Chelsea	403	371	420	382*	408	394*	363	340	386	433	3900
Tott H	340	342	403	441	452	432	384	375	423	439	4031
Everton	449	413	365	388	315	459	459	432	472	386	4138
Man U	367	361*	399	453	472	497	404	433	433	452	4271
Leicester				457	405*	451	365	351	418	416

Man U committed the most fouls last season – 107 fouls more than Arsenal!

Manchester United are also the top fouling PL team of the past ten years.  Liverpool have been called out for the least number of fouls and Arsenal are second being called out for 29 more fouls (fractionally under 3 per season) than Liverpool.

The gap between most fouling Manchester United and least fouling Liverpool is 533 fouls, or a whopping 53 fouls per season.

So let’s look at the league winners and the number of fouls each season with a comparison of Arsenal at the foot of the table.

Season	League winners	Fouls in season	Highest fouling season	Lowest fouling season
2011/12	Manchester City	384	443	328
2012/13	Manchester United	361	497	361
2013/14	Manchester City	394	443	328
2014/15	Chelsea	382	433	363
2015/16	Leicester	405	457	351
2016/17	Chelsea	394	433	363
2017/18	Manchester City	344	443	328
2018/19	Manchester City	328	443	328
2019/20	Liverpool	331	422	315
2020/21	Manchester City	361	443	361
	Arsenal overall …		421	345

In short to be in contention for the title one needs to commit under 400 fouls.  How clear an indicator this is can be seen from Manchester City’s line season by season.  They have won the league four times in the last decade and each time with under 400 fouls.

Having the lowest number of fouls does not guarantee winning the title, but it is a help.

Summary

The average number of fouls committed by the league winner across the last ten years is 368.  Of course just cutting fouls doesn’t guarantee the title, but it is a significant step in the right direction.

For two seasons Arsenal have been way above that number, but last season were right down to 345 fouls. And that decline came from the worst fouling season in a decade the year before (421 fouls), which explains why the opening of the 2020/21 campaign was so awful, seeing Arsenal drop to 15th, one third of the way into the season.

Of course the pundits don’t have a clue about any of this – you maybe remember the time when the BT Sport team covering the Emirates cup made fun of the 3 points for a win and 1 for a goal calculation, saying it was too difficult to understand.

But we put things right in the first third of last season and so now the club can build on this achievement of cutting out fouls (which had the knock on effect of cutting out yellow cards) by building up the attack.

Thanks to James Curtis of Curtis Associates Research Ltd for preparing this data.

The statistical enquiry of 2021

• How tackling is changing in the PL and how it is affecting clubs’ position in the league
• Making up statistics about Arsenal is ok… until someone bothers to check.
• New fouls and yellow card data suggest refs are reacting to club ploys.
• Arsenal keeper to be replaced by 8 year old who’s never played football
• The Key Data Tables 2020/21