- From 16 December 2020 to now: just how far have Arsenal come?
- When being in a league means lots of travel and endless defeats
By Tony Attwood
Why does it matter if one referee oversees multiple Arsenal matches in a season?
Actually, it doesn’t, unless that referee is biased in any way. Not necessarily biased for or against Arsenal, but maybe biased in favour of away side. It might not be deliberate of course, he may well not know he does it, but it could just be there.
Now most of us have prejudices – often of a minor nature – and quite often we are not aware of them. A typical example comes with the type of music we like – most of us find it hard to explain exactly why we like one type of music or one particular song rather than another, just as why we like one type of novel, one type of movie, one particular newscaster…. It is just how we are.
And there is indeed a great benefit in us all being different since it means that as a race we don’t all suffer from the same illnesses, prejudices etc, which helps the race survive.
Now refs are people like you and me, and they too have different prejudices. One ref always see one type of tackle as a foul, another will often see it as just a passing accident or even a fair tackle. That’s how it goes; they are never all going to see everything the same way.
And so, because of this it is a good idea to rotate referees so that no club benefits from the largesse of one referee or the negativitiy of another more than a couple of times a season.
Now you would expect the richest league in the world to have sufficient training so that most of these prejudices could be overcome, and enough professional referees so that even if the prejudices remain, no club sees the same ref more that twice in a season (ideally once at home, and once away).
And it was to see if this was happening that we launched the Reffymandering website. on which we’ve been investigating referee footprints – which is to say how many times each ref sees each Premier League club. And this is important given that last season Antony Taylor oversaw 25% of his home games as home wins, while John Bond saw 69% of his games as home wins. For if that is how it goes, we need to ensure that each ref never sees each club more than twice (once home, once away) per season.
So we are not saying that all referees should have the same average of (for example) 60% home wins, but rather that each club should never have a match overseen by the same referee more than twice in a season – once at home and once away.
Now to see how this goes our friends at the Reffymandering website (the word is derived from the activity of manipulation of an electoral constituency’s boundaries so as to favour one party or class) have started to do analyses. Not analyses of the “that was never a foul” variety – but of factually unchallengeable statistics. Such as that Arsenal have seen the same referees involved in their games four times – and we are only in December!
So to be very clear we are not presenting evidence to show that having the same referee invovled in Arlsenal games four times in less than half the sesaon means that this referee is deliberately acting in favour or against Arsenal.
Butwe are highlighting a risk – and risks should be minimised. If I go to cast my vote in a UK. election, I go into a private booth to make my cross, and then fold the paper over and drop it in the box. Te procedure is there as a precautiion, helpinig to ensure that the election is fair.
In the same way we are not presenting evidence to say referees are manipulating games in favour of certain clubs, but we know from the evidence already presented that one PGMO referee oversees 68% of his games as home wins while another sees just 26% as home wins. We don’t know why that is the case but the official figures clearly show this to be the case.
So logic suggests that the richest league in the world should have enough quality referees available to ensure the home-biased referees only see Arsenal twice, once at home and once away. And likeswise the away-biased referees.
It is dead simple. The money is there (it’s the richest league in the world remember) and so it could be done in a trice. But it isn’t.
So we are therefore asking three questions: a) why is it like this, b) why is no one doing anything about it, c) why don’t the media even mention it?
You’ll find a list of referees active this season, and how many times they have each overseen an Arsenal game on the Reffymandering website along with data on how many of the games were home wins, how many away wins and how many draws.
Of course you might feel we are going a bit overboard on this, but there is a key point here. Knowing who the referee is for a match gives clubs a lot of information as to what is likely to happen in the match. It makes a sensible manager change his approach.
I don’t know if PGMO have persuaded the media not to mention this, or if the commentators genuinely don’t see the referee bias in front of them. Or maybe they have been told by their editors that readers aren’t interested in refereeing. But whatever the reason, I’ve never seen or heard a journalist comment on the fact that “this is a home win referee”. Indeed even when there are statistics available showing that some referees hardlhy ever oversee away wins (14% for Darren Bond last season) while some seem to see almost nothing but away wins (51.6% for Anthony Taylor) no one seems to mind, still I have never heard a commentator mention this.
So we have set up https://reffymandering.net/ to provide the information. We’ve only just started, but I can assure you, this is going to grow.
