Is it possible to have error free refereeing in football?

 

• Is it possible to have error free refereeing in football?
• Arsenal are almost there, with just minor issues ahead

By Tony Attwood

In answer to the question in the headline, I would say probably not, because the game moves at speed and we have the notion of “playing the advantage” within the rules.   For these two reasons alone, there are always going to be issues within the game.

What we therefore should be looking for is not a sport in which the referee makes no errors at all, but rather the number of errors made by referees is as now as possible and where there are errors they are not events which deliberately give the benefit to one particular team.

Thus, the aim should be to have a sport which heads in the direction of referees who don’t make errors in and around situations which can lead to goals.

Now that is a fairly complex requirement and needs a lot of thought and preparation, so that in the end, we get training for referees which cuts their number of errors dramatically. 

Now I don’t think I have ever seen any debate on this subject, nor indeed articles on how referees are trained, and how they are selected.

But because none of us involved with Untold really know that much about how referees are trained for Premier League matches, we can’t make much of a judgment on that training – and that seems to me to be an issue in itself.  Why don’t we know more about the minute details of how referees are trained?   Surely it would be an interesting subject and one that quite a few commentators on refereeing would want to comment about, which referees have done what, and there is a website that gives it all:   Just click here.    And if you want more, you can just click on the “Results” tab near the top.

So when it comes to which referees are chosen for which matches, we do know quite a lot, and it is in looking at this information that we have come across the really alarming statistics about referee decision-making.    We have referees who get to see the same clubs over and over again.   We get referees who see more than twice as many home wins as others.   And so on.   All the data is on that site, and indeed, we quote it here quite often.

Now, from this, we can tell immediately that some referees are prone to seeing a much higher percentage of home wins than others, while some give out many more yellow cards per match than others.

So let us just take yellow cards as our one example – you can go on and check any sort of data on that site (although now we are giving it quite a bit of publicity, it would not surprise me if PGMO asked for it to be taken down pretty sharpish.

But we can say today that Stuart Attwell gives out 4.5 yellow cards a game on average, while Craig Pearson gives out 2.7 on average.  That means that Attwell gives out over 66% more yellows in each game than Pawson.

Now this matters if Attwell keeps seeing the same team over and over again  ... and rather curiously, it has of late become somewhat harder to see exactly which referee is seeing the same club over and over again.   Although we still know that John Brooks sees almost three-quarters of his games as home wins, while Tony Harrington sees half of his games as away wins.   Which really is a bit curious.

There are a vast number of oddities about referee performances which you can find on the website noted above, although as the above commentary suggests, certain data tends to disappear occasionally, just when we have used it to point out a real oddity in the way different referees work.  But I am sure that is just a coincidence.

But the key fact is, as I have mentioned before, this very high level of discrepancy between the figures of different referees is seemingly never mentioned in the mainstream media, be it in print or broadcast.   And really, who the referee is and his propensity for overseeing certain types of scorelines, really is very informative if you would like to take a view on the most likely result of the game.

Of course, what we also don’t know is how referees are chosen, and why the same referee keeps seeing the same club over and over again.  Or come to that, why are there not enough referees of sufficient quality so that no club gets the same referee more than twice in each season, once at home and once away?

At the moment, there is an enquiry going on into someone filming a training session of a team and feeding the data to that club’s forthcoming opposition.  Maybe that matters, maybe not, but I can’t help thinking that the propensity for some referees to see a high percentage of home wins while another sees a high percentage of away wins, is much more important.   Because that sort of bias should most certainly not exist.