- Arsenal have been poor all season.
- When it comes to Arsenal v Tottenham, it really is all going Arsenal’s way
By Tony Attwood
Referee: Simon Hooper is supposedly one of the top ten referees for PGMO – the referees that have each covered over ten Premier League games this season. And in three simple columns, we can see just how much who Arsenal get as the referee, affects the match.
As you can see here are three referees who have each overseen 12 games this season in the Premier League. The number of fouls per game that they perceive varies by 45% – that is Robert Jones sees 45% more fouls per game (and that means on average in each and every game, not just in the odd one or two games) and hands out more than one more yellow card in each and every game he oversees, than Peter Banks. Our referee for the Tottenham game is between the two.
| Referee | Games | Fouls pg | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simon Hooper | 12 | 20.75 | 4.58 |
| Peter Bankes | 12 | 18.08 | 3.83 |
| Robert Jones | 12 | 26.17 | 4.67 |
But there is something a bit weird about Hooper in that he only awards red cards against the home teams, even though on average the away team tackles more and commits more fouls. So it is quite likely that Arsenal’s natural home advantage against Tottenham will be wiped out by some curious refereeing decisions that overall favour the away team.
However such worries about Hooper are massively overshadowed by the way the results pan out among the PGMO chosen men this season. Looking only at referees who have seen nine or more Premier League games this season we find only 33% of Mr Hooper’s games have ended as home wins – that is just four wins out of 12 matches. This compares with John Brooks and Darren Bond, each of whom have seen nine Premier League games this season and each of whom have overseen seven home wins, one away win and one draw.
77% home wins for Brooks and Bond. 33% home wins for Hooper who we see for Arsenal at home. If PGMO ever answered people’s concerns about referees they would probably call it the luck of the draw. But of course they don’t ever answer concerns about referees.
So to be clear, our referee for this match against Tottenham, Mr Hooper, has seen 12 games, but only four of them have been home wins and five have been away wins.
In short the PGMO could have given us a referee who persistently sees home wins, but no, this is Arsenal so we get a referee who hardly ever sees home wins – in fact he sees more away wins than home wins.
The fact that referees have these diverse figures is itself nonsense. It is true that we can be thankful that we don’t have Anthony Taylor who has only seen three home wins in 18 Premier League games this campaign, but even so, this referee is not an ideal choice for Arsenal.
The point is that games are influenced by crowds. We know that because of the research done during the pandemic when instead of the most common result being home wins, this changed when no crowds were present to most games ending up as away wins. To prove it was the crowd that influenced the referee (rather than, for example the players at home feeling strange because of the lack of noise on their own ground) a group of professional referees were given games to referee on screen, by a group of professional researchers at London University. Half the referees had headphones on with recordings of the actual crowd noise from the game, half had headphones on with no sound being played.
The referees with headphones that relayed the actual crowd noise from the game were far more biased toward the home team than the referees with no sound on their headphones who were watching the same match. Not just once, but over and over again.
Despite these findings, this research is never noted in the media, and anyone who suggests that referees are biased is laughed at – without the research being considered. As for the crazy figures that show that one referee hardly sees home wins, while another sees nothing but home wins – this is thought of as being too complicated for the average reader to grasp.
In the Premier League it is simple. Which referee a club gets goes quite a long way to determining the outcome of a match – which often means determining whether a match ends 1-1, 1-0 or 0-1.
If it looks weird just remember – this referee doesn’t do home wins.
