By Tony Attwood
There is a piece on the New York Times football feed that says, “All three of Istanbul’s great powers — Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and Besiktas — have long believed they are being actively undermined by shadowy forces intent on helping their rivals. Trabzonspor, the largest team from outside Istanbul, are convinced they are oppressed by the power of those three clubs. Everyone else feels things are rigged in favour of an elite that often includes Trabzonspor.
“In recent years, though, something has changed. The conspiracy theories that always bubbled beneath the surface have reached a boiling point, their toxic fumes engulfing and slowly asphyxiating the league.”
It is a fairly typical argument in terms of football journalists incorporating the view that something is going very wrong in a foreign land, and (often by implication but sometimes said clearly) things are ok in England. In short it’s a case of these silly foreigners getting worked up, while English people can stay calm.
But most of all we almost always find that there is no evidence to support any of the claims made. And so thinking of that, we might ask, “how are things kept so calm in England, in comparison?”
One key point is that the mainstream English media rarely criticise referees. Yes they occasionally do point to the odd mistake, but not too often and not much more.
Now that might seem fair enough, but actually the media go much further than that, and they get away with it, because what they are carefully doing is stifling argument and debate by channelling it along the lines they consider acceptable.
The fact is one only has to look at the four page of referee data tables for the Premier League constantly updated by WhoScored to see that in the Premier League we have some referees who oversee home wins most of the time, and some referees who oversee away wins most of the time.
Study the data further and you will see that among the most used referees the number of fouls given a game on average across the season by an individual referee can range from 25.13 down to 19.35 – a variation of 30%. The number of yellow cards per game ranges from 5.42 to 3.13 – a range of 73%.
And remember these are not just results for one game, but the average across the whole season – and only looking at referees who have overseen 10+ PL games this season.
As for home wins, we have one referee for whom 75% of his games are home wins, and another for whom 11,8% are home wins. That is a difference of over 500%. In short, the referee a club gets has as much influence on the result as the two teams playing.
Now, these figures never appear in the media. Nor come to that, on a different subject, do we ever get any statistics about how many managerial changes actually lead to an improvement in the club’s fortunes.
Because of the failure of the media to take on any of these points and discuss them openly, the debate in England is very much constrained because it is conducted without evidence. Thus, people might say, “we need to get rid of Arteta because Arsenal have ended up without a proper centre forward and indeed hasn’t had a proper centre forward for the last few seasons.”
But no one establishes a causal link between Arteta’s purchasing policy and the club’s failure to win the league, nor mentioned the number of managerial sackings that over the following two years don’t lead to improvement on the pitch.
And this is a bit weird for Arsenal supporters to fall for that, given that between 2019 and today Tottenham has had seven managers and has come 6th, 7th, 4th, 8th, and 5th. This season they are currently 13th, 21 points behind Arsenal
As for why no evidence is used in any of these debates, the answer is simple: the story that Arsenal needs a new manager is run by the media, and the media base their football pages on readership levels. So run the story that Arsenal need a new centre forward and if a lot of people read that, then it will appear again and again. This has nothing to do with the truth – it is all down to readership volume.
The notion that changing managers does not, on most occasions, lead to an improvement in results can be seen by a casual glance at Tottenham or by analysing the results of all the premier league managerial changes in the last five years. The notion that a Premier League club can do well with goals coming from multiple sources can be seen through an analysis of Arsenal’s results in the last two seasons. The notion that a series of injuries can derail any team other than one that has unrestrained abilities to buy both expensive players and brilliant young players from its associated clubs can be seen by looking at the effectiveness of the City Group.
It’s all there, but the media don’t cover it, for one simple reason. As things stand they can print any story they want without any data, and that story will be reflected around all the rest of the media, and so come to look as if it is true. And when you have a situation like that, why change it for something that needs a lot more hard work?
After all, it’s only football. And as I just suggested, why change the current approach to reporting for something that needs a lot more hard work, when no one is asking for it.
