Arsenal and Chelsea en route for over 100 yellow cards each this season

Which club has the worst discipline record this season?  Which team is the referee’s favourite with the least cards this season?

OK if you have heard someone discuss this on the radio or looked it up you will know, but my guess is that you might be as surprised as me to find out that the club with the worst discipline results this season is Arsenal with eight yellow cards and one red.  We are closely followed by Chelsea and Southampton.

So it’s a good job that football journalists are often completely lazy sods who enjoy the pub more than the research otherwise that would be all over the headlines at the moment.

The cleanest team is also a surprise this season: Everton with three yellows and one red.

What makes this all the more odd is that last season Arsenal were 19th in the league table for yellow cards, with 62 yellows from all reasons, making it  1,63 yellows a game.

Top of the league for yellows from all causes was Chelsea with 105 yellows or 2.76 a game.  This season they are still on course being in second place with eight yellows so far (the same as Arsenal).   That would amount to 152 cards in the season – an all time record – if either Arsenal or Chelsea carry on this way.  Last season Chelsea were top with 105 cards.

So on the basis of three matches so far we have had 132 yellow cards waved making the average 4.4 yellow cards a game which means, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations that we could be heading for the highest number of yellows ever.

In terms of cards for fouls, Aston Villa and Ipswich are top of the league with eight each which if they continued at this rate would give them 101 cards each from fouls alone – an all time record – as well as a lot of suspensions.

But there is one very, very strange statistic that I must share with you.   Everton have put in 23 tackles this season so far, the second highest level of any club.  Only Manchester United have put in more with 24.   But Everton have only got three yellow cards while Manchester United have eight.

And one more little analysis to keep us contemplating while waiting for football proper to restart.  It shows that the level of success that a club’s players have with shooting on target has virtually nothing to do with their success on the pitch.

It also shows that nothing much can be gathered from the number of shots a club has.  For basically in terms of getting shots on target rather than wide of the goal, Chelsea are doing very well with almost half of their shots on target.  The worst club in this regard from our collection of seven big clubs plus Nottingham Forest is Liverpool who actually manage to get only 33% of their shots on target.

What this means overall is that the amount a club shoots is really much an indicator of anything.   Nottingham Forest are shooting 17.7 times a game and have scored three goals.  Newcastle United shoot 8.7 times a game and have scored four.

If Arsenal can take their shooting level up a little bit more but stay with the accuracy level we should see a rapid rise up the league table, to top.

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