By Tony Attwood
Read most newspaper comments, or listen to most radio or TV commentaries, and you will see or hear a disproportionate level of negativity in those reports (unless they are reports written about the media’s favourite clubs – and you know who they are). Indeed, when writing about the vast majority of clubs, it has got to the point that it is almost enough for a journalist to write or speak negatively, unless the club is one of the media’s favourites.
And yet this has led to a rather strange situation, because journalists who are paid to go to the game get free refreshments and free seats. And they generally see matches which are completely different from the games that I see. I mean, we go to the same match, but what we see is utterly different. And I wonder why that is.
To get a bit of a clue as to what is going on, I have often visited grounds where lower league clubs play, and have managed to sit very close to the journalists who cover the matches, and listened to their conversations. And the one thing that has struck me is how much talk there is between the journos about whether one incident was a foul, who it was who actually scored a goal (when it is not clear on the pitch) etc. And the implication is that the journalists’ main desire is to ensure that they all have a fairly similar view of what happened and no one steps out of line. It might not be reality, but because they all reach the same conclusion, is makes it look like this is the truth.
There is also a clear consensus among journalists about referees – a consensus that often the crowd does not share. And yet, as one who has been watching football for many, many years, I can see that the consensus has now broken down – as many fans see issues in games that the journalists refuse to report, or if they do report them, do so with a very different slant. What we now have is a situation in which the journalists and PGMO are often as one, while those of us who pay to go into the game see a different match.
And when you think about it, we don’t have this in any other walk of life. If a politician says something, others can disagree. If a doctor says something, you can get a second opinion. If I write something and you think it is tripe, you can go and read another blog. But in football, there is no alternative view: most of the commentators are as one. Only the fans and the clubs have a different view, but the media are instructed not to report dissent over referee decisions.
And yet for years we have been showing that there is something significantly wrong with refereeing in England. It started off with the regular referee reviews that Walter Broeckx undertook – a unique perspective since Walter himself was a referee. More recently, we’ve been looking at statistics and again found oddities.
For example, Simon Hooper sees 21% more fouls on average in each and every Premier League game that he referees than Samuel Barrott does. And that is not in one game, that is in game after game. Stewart Attwell waves 86% more yellow cards per game than Michael Oliver. Peter Bankes sees more than twice as many of his games end as home wins as Stuart Attwell – and so it goes on and on.
So we are now at the stage where before each game, any sensible club analyses the previous performance of the referees and adviss the players on how to adjust their game.
And all the while the perfectly reasonable suggestion as to a first step to overcome this problem (that of ensuring that each referee can only oversee a game involvling each club twice at most – once at home and once away) is ignored even though the Premier League could easily afford more referees.
Thus we have a double problem – referees have easy to see biases, yet the media will not even mention the story. The inevitable conclusion is that the referees and clubs are in cahoots, and it is no wonder that supporters are getting very angry with the situation.
However Untold benefitted from Walter’s insights as a refere himself, and my own modest input as being a person whose research degree incorporated a fairly large amount of statistical analaysis, helped unravel the situation. And we;ve publsihed the results.
68% of the games Peter Bankes sees are home wins. 56% of the games Jarred Gillet sees are away wins. So if you were a premier league manager and you were playing away, which referee would you be asking for?
Of course PGMO can say it all balances out in the end – but it doesn’t because some clubs see the same referee half a dozen times or more in a season. Of course the edifice will crumble eventually, and when it does it is likely to bring down the whole of the Premier League with it, because it will be recognised that so many of the results of matches in the top division are in fact as much down to which referee sees the game as what the teams do. And that means the league table is largely a farce.
But it is not just PGMO that is the problem. For either the mass media have signed agreements with PGMO that they will not criticise the referees, or their reporters are so dumb that they can’t read statistics. All we can do is keep on pointing to the statistics. If you want to see some more all published by an independent research company, take a look here.
