How PGMOL’s Accidental Genius Became Accidental Slapstick

 

 

• How PGMOL’s Accidental Genius Became Accidental Slapstick
• Why making predictions early is not always a good idea

By Christophe Jost

A quick note on timing:

We wrote the MW20 preview, identifying suspicious referee assignment patterns before the matches kicked off on January 3rd. The analysis showed how home-biased referees were deployed to matches where top teams played away, and away-biased referees went to matches where struggling teams needed help—creating perfect conditions for table compression.

We called it “the accidental genius of PGMOL incompetence.” But life intervened, and we didn’t publish the preview before matchday. So instead of warning you what might happen, we’re now reporting what actually happened.

Spoiler alert: the football gods read our analysis and decided to mess with everyone involved. What follows is that original preview analysis, now annotated with the cold hard reality of results that refused to cooperate with either PGMOL’s incompetence or our pattern recognition. Sometimes the universe has better comic timing than we do.

Remember our MW20 preview when we pointed out how PGMOL’s “incompetent” referee assignments seemed perfectly calibrated to compress the Premier League table? How Nottingham Forest received Simon Hooper (50% home win rate) against Villa to knock them from the summit, Arsenal drew Chris Kavanagh (50% home, 21% away) at Bournemouth to drop points, and Liverpool got Craig Pawson (43% home) at Fulham to close the gap on Arsenal? Well, the football gods have a sense of humor. Here’s what PGMOL’s non-masterplan achieved:

 

Match	Referee Type	Expected Pattern	Actual Result	Status
Forest vs Villa	Home-biased	Villa struggle	Villa win	FAIL
Bournemouth vs Arsenal	Home-biased	Arsenal struggle	Arsenal win	FAIL
Fulham vs Liverpool	Home-biased	Liverpool struggle	Draw	FAIL
Leeds vs Man United	Away-biased	ManU advantage	Draw	FAIL
Man City vs Chelsea	Away-biased	Chelsea advantage	Draw	FAIL
Spurs vs Sunderland	Away-biased	Sunderland advantage	Draw	FAIL

 

Six matches where referee outcome patterns should have produced predictable effects. Six complete failures. Every single accidental tendency thwarted.

In short, Villa won anyway. Arsenal won anyway. Liverpool drew. Manchester United drew. Chelsea-City drew. Tottenham-Sunderland drew.

It was like watching someone accidentally knock over a row of dominoes and have them all land standing upright. The only thing that got compressed was the theory that referee assignments matter at all.

Here’s the beautiful irony: PGMOL doesn’t track referee outcome patterns—we know this because if they did, these concentration issues would never have developed in the first place.

But MW20 demonstrates that even if they accidentally created optimal conditions for table compression through their ignorance of RGO data, football refused to cooperate.

It’s one thing to fail through not knowing these patterns exist. It’s quite another to stumble blindly into deploying them perfectly and watch every single match ignore the script. Forest’s victory, Arsenal’s win, and four straight draws: this is what happens when institutional incompetence accidentally creates conditions for competitive manipulation but forgets to tell the ball.

The lesson? PGMOL’s failure to track referee-club encounter frequency and referee outcome patterns means they assign officials blindly—based on availability, geography, and rotation—without any consideration of accumulating concentration or historical tendencies.

MW20 proved that this blind incompetence can accidentally create patterns that look strategic, but the universe doesn’t care about patterns PGMOL doesn’t know exist. They assigned home-biased refs to matches where home teams “should” have struggled, away-biased refs where away teams “should” have thrived, and somehow reality declined to participate.

The only thing narrower after MW20 is the gap between institutional incompetence and cosmic mockery. You can’t accidentally be this systematically wrong and this spectacularly unsuccessful. But PGMOL managed both. That takes dedication to not knowing what you’re doing.