- 115 charges still outstanding as Arsenal prepare for Man United
- Man U v Arsenal. I hope the Arsenal players have all been warned
- Is there a regional bias over the way referees hand out cards?
By Tony Attwood
We have discovered over the years that there is a regional bias in the way referees hand out cards – and in this regard, Arsenal suffer. So in this Sunday’s game Arsenal will face the usual uphill struggle that they have when playing away to a northern team.
But on the other hand, we can take it that they are getting more used to this by now, although even though they have been warned about it, it is noticeable that some of the new recruits to the Arsenal team can be visibly shocked by their treatment in away games. It seems that when people say “there is something not quite right with refereeing in the Premier League” they find it impossible to believe that the “best league in the world” could allow such a situation to develop. But it has.
So, even though the players are told in no uncertain terms that they should not go into the game against Manchester United expecting fair and equal treatment from the referee, some might still be tempted so to do. But to do so will weaken their position – they have to expect bias at the very least when it comes to the handing out of disciplinary cards.
Thus I thought it might be worth looking at one or two other metrics ahead of the first game of the season.
The figures in the table below are for last season and come from WhoScored – and to emphasise the point we are looking at Arsenal’s figures for last season away from home, and Manchester United’s figures for last season at home
In this regard, given that there are more home wins than away wins in league football, we may expect that Manchester United might outperform Arsenal when their home performance is measured against Arsenal’s away performance last season – even though Arsenal ended up far higher up the league table than Many.
In fact, the figures that we find are more nuanced than that as this table shows….
| Team | Goals | Shots | shot success | Yellow | Red | Possession |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFC (a) | 34 | 241 | 14% | 33 | 4 | 56.7% |
| Man U (h) | 23 | 281 | 8% | 41 | 2 | 53.2% |
Arsenal, as we can see, scored a lot more goals away from home than ManU scored at home last season (according to these figures from Whoscored In fact 48% more. But Arsenal achieved this by having fewer shots per game away from home than ManU had at home.
In fact Arsenal had an almost double success rate for their shots away from home last season, as Manchester United did for their shots at home. And we must remember that not only is a shot that fails to score a failure in itself, but it also gives the ball to the opposition. This is why some fans often encourage the opposition to shoot – knowing that the chance of a goal is vanishingly small.
Of course, we also know that Manchester United got over 24% more yellow cards at home than Arsenal did away last season – another interesting measure of the northern club’s failure to understand the basics of how they are failing.
But to some degree, they were rescued by the willingness of referees to try to knock Arsenal back by handing out red cards to Arsenal. And here we might notice the statistics of last season once more (not least because the bulk of the media refuse to engage in this issue).
Fof this little exercise we might look at the yellow and red cards of Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea last season.
| Team | Yellow | Red | % of red to yellow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chelsea | 99 | 2 | 49.5% |
| Manchester United | 84 | 3 | 28% |
| Arsenal | 64 | 6 | 10.7% |
If you have watched Arsenal last season and believe that Arsenal deserved 300% the numberer of red cards as Chelsea while getting around two-thirds of the number of yellow cards, then we were watching different games of football..
Overall, the figures above suggest that Manchester U were following a tactic at home of shooting whenever the chance arose, irrespective of the chance of that shot getting a goal. They were in fact afte a few “lucky bounces” and “unsighted keepers”.
This is something that can be encouraged by frustrated home fans shouting “SHOOT” every time there is an attack – and indeed a few away fans started to latch onto this last season, as away supporters have been noticed in some grounds, joining in the SHOOT shout when the home team gets near the area, knowing that most of the time the shot will go high or wide or be easily saved. Quite a jolly little development I thought.
