How referees change season by season and how it affects clubs

 

By Tony Attwood

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• Arsenal are not having a wobble, but here’s an interesting twist for tonight

Chris Kavanagh has been appointed referee for Bournemouth vs. Arsenal on Saturday evening.

He is one of just three referees who have been given 15 games in the Premier League so far this season.    Last season he was the third most used referee in the league, overseeing 25 games.  Anthony Taylor was the most used referee with 31 games.    Three referees got just two games each last season – David Webb, Sam Allison and Andrew Kitchen.  Kitchen has had three games this season – the other two none at all.  It would be nice if the PGMOL told us why, (were their performances too awfrul?) but if they have published anything about this, I can’t find it.  If you find it, do let me know.

For tomorrow’s match, I am looking at the referee for the game along with the two referees who have overseen more games than Referee Kavanagh.

First the result of their actions in the last season

 

Referee 24/5	Games	Fouls pg	Fouls/Tackles	Pen pg	Yel pg
Anthony Taylor	31	21.26	0.60	0.29	2.87
Michae Oliver	26	23.15	0.63	0.12	4.35
Chris Kavanagh	25	21.40	0.61	0.12	4.44

 

And now this season

 

Referee 25/6	Games	Fouls pg	Fouls/Tackles	Pen pg	Yel pg
Anthony Taylor	15	20.00	0.57	0.27	3.93
Michael Oliver	15	22.00	0.62	0.07	2.33
Chris Kavanagh	15	22.87	0.68	0.33	3.87

 

The first thing we note is that the difference in the number of fouls per game from each referee has grown.   – the differece between top and bottom of the list this season is 2.87 fouls per game.  Last season it was 1.89.  But that is on average an increase of about one foul a game, which surely is fairly reasonable.  Whether a club gets Taylor, Oliver or Kavanagh, the club is not going to have to tell its players to change their style.

But something very odd has happened with penalties.   Referee Kavanagh is seeing almost three times as many penalties per game as he saw in 15 games last season.  On the other hand, Oliver has only seen about half the number of penalties this season as he saw last season.  And remember our measurements are PER GAME so the fact that we are only halfway through the season makes no odds.

These are pretty wild fluctuations, and we still have the fact that how many penalties you will get in a game depends primarily on which referee you have.   This season Taylor sees twice as many penalties as Taylor.  But now Kavanagh is seeing almost five times as many fouls that result in penalties as Oliver. And yet the number of fouls they see per game is almost identical!

As for yellow cards, it looks to me as if Taylor was given a big talking to last season and told to wave more cards about.   For how else do we explain the fact that he is waving 40% more yellow cards than he did last season in the opening 15 games this season?

But now consider this: Taylor’s yellow cards UP by 37% Oliver’s yellow cards DOWN by 47%!!!

To be clear, we are not expecting each referee to hand out the same number of yellows each season, but all other things being equal, we would expect there to be some sort of similarity between the referees, in that they might all be up a bit or all down a bit – but not changing as widly as we see here.

But here we have one referee handing out over a third more cards and another cutting his toll by almost a half.   We may ask, what on earth is going on???

The first possibility is that the whole card issue is fairly random, and what makes an action worthy of a card is virtually impossible to define.  So the numbers will vary enormously, and basically, the system is both broken and in its current state pretty pointless.

Or perhaps, even worse, some referees are being told to go easy, and others to be tougher on fouls!

Either way, there can be no doubt that the current system of handing out yellow cards is broken, in that it is to some degree random, and particularly affected by the referee the game gets, and how he feels on that day!!!

Likewise, the awarding of penalties seems equally random.

Now, if we could say that each referee only oversees games of each team twice a season, then this would still not be ideal, but it wouldn’t matter so much.    Arsenal would know that they only get Taylor twice in a season, and for those games could ease up a little on the tackling in the penalty area while hoping that the opposition don’t take any notice of statistics and go on playing their normal game.

But as has been shown on multiple occasions, some clubs get the same referees over and over again – and that is the problem which the media won’t mention, and PGMOL won’t address.

If you want to know more about the problem with refereeing in the Premier League the site to visit is www.reffymandering.net