By Tony Attwood. Full acknowledgement of the source of much of the data for this piece is given at the end.
- Is it possible to have error free refereeing in football?
- Arsenal are almost there, with just minor issues ahead
When Untold first started publishing articles about refereeing, we were enormously helped and supported by having Walter Broeckx, himself a referee, aiding our enquiries and indeed writing numerous articles. Those who were open to the idea that maybe there was something wrong with refereeing in the Premier League and indeed with the whole of the way in which refereeing was organised in the Premier League, via PGMOL were, perhaps for the first time, able to see just how contentious the organisation of refereeing in Premier League games there was, and we were able to ask why the media in general were not touching this topic.
This raised two questions: one was how “the best league in the world” was getting refereeing so wrong, and the other was “why, even when we were making the issues public, would the media not pick up on the issue?” but instead were portraying the situation as one in which fans simply complained about a ref making a mistake to the detriment of their own club.
Of course, this is an enormous subject, and when family matters drew Walter away from Untold, and we were left without a resident expert, we moved on to the more statistical points, such as why certain referees oversaw the same clubs so often, and why our simple idea of no referee seeing the same club more than twice in a season etc was not taken up.
Then we noted how some referees oversee matches, generating a certain type of result so often. For there are indeed “home win refs” and “away win refs” and “draw refs” which means once you know who the ref is, you can have a fairly good idea of what the result will be.
And from there we started asking: why is no newspaper or broadcaster picking up on this, even if it is just to show that somehow our figures were wrong (which we don’t think they are)?
But as you may have noticed, now, very occasionally, other blogs are picking up on these matters. Not TV channels, and not newspapers, so not major outlets of football information, but even so, it is no longer just us. You can read the article here.
Now, most people who comment on referees pick on specific referee “errors” and, from those specific points, draw a conclusion that, because of a referee, a certain club was cheated out of a win. That may be happening, but that is almost impossible to prove because none of us knows the referees’ motivations.
But when we see a system that does not have some of the basic protections that one might expect to ensure that refereeing is fair and reasonable, then one can ask why this is the case.
In the article cited, however, the writer looked at WHU v Arsenal and Liverpool v ManC and pointed out that the referee Anthony Taylor was involved in both games across one weekend. It is, in fact, a variation on our approach of noting how many times Mr Taylor has been the referee in an Arsenal match in a season. As we have said so many times, there is no reason not to have enough referees so each club only sees a referee twice in a season. Now we find Taylor doing two matches on consecutive days. And here the writer can offer an insight from Italy, where he played football, which simply is, “I don’t think I have ever seen anything like that in that league.” An interesting comment.
Now the writer started with the same assumption that we had, that “a fair appointment policy would be to equally distribute those referees to each club over the season. This means that with the ref, the 4th official, the VAR assistant, each referee would get either 54 or 55 games a season (the writer goes through all the maths, and you can check the numbers if you want from his very detailed account). So in essence, if each official saw each club an equal number of times, each official would see each club either two or three times in a season in one of those key refereeing roles.
But as you will know if you follow Untold this season, we have officials seeing the same club four or more times – and that is only counting his appearances as the prime referee. Indeed, this has been a major part of our campaign – pointing out that some referees have been the referee for Arsenal games four times or more. And that is just as referee – we are not counting their appearances as linesmen, VAR officials or anything else In fact, when you add in all the tasks the ref can take on, some of these referees are seeing the same club over and over and over again.
To quote exactly from my source, “a referee like Michael Oliver will end the season having been assigned to a Manchester City game 11–12 times.”
Now I must admit I took the easy route. Once I saw certain referees seeing Arsenal many more times than the two occasions a season, I thought it was fair, and I left the point at that. But now we see that their influence goes much further when we include the other roles they can play – particularly including the ever more influential VAR.
So what we have in incredible detail is a verification of the points we have been making since Walter first started writing about referees on Untold, plus the additional point here that “Unlike in other countries, English commentators always vow to find ways to justify a referee’s decision rather than question it.”
Now we have put forward the view that this is a condition of PGMOs agreement to the broadcasting contracts, although we don’t have proof of that. But what other reason could there be for the media never to focus on referee errors?
The writer then adds, “it shouldn’t really matter who is assigned to any match,” but as we show week after week, this is not the case – the variance between the number of home wins, away wins and draws that each referee sees in a seaon in enormous, and far beyond anything that we would expect by pure chance. So it does matter, especially when, as the writer points out, in agreement with our commentaries, “the workload is already very uneven.” And I would refer you to the article we are citing here since he does give details of some of the extraordinary workload of some of the referees week by week – and this workload, the investigation shows, has an impact on some of the referees, such as …
- “more bookings, with a reduced tolerance for dissent
- “an increase in VAR checks and the time they take (20% longer)
- “a peak of events between the 75th and 90th minute.”
Here’s an example of this impact: “For Newcastle United-West Ham 0–2, on the 25th of November, all six officials were on their double shift.” There are many more examples in the original article, and as the writer says, we might care to be worried about “an official’s mental health with this workload.” Before turning to writing and research, I worked as a secondary school teacher, and then in the theatre, and I know what stress can be like. But refereeing at that level? That goes much further as “Some referees with the heaviest workloads also travel on International duty mid-week, but they are still the ones with the most appearances during the weekend.”
And all these concerns come before we have even touched on the issue of referee allegiance. But I shall leave that until next time. Meanwhile, you can read the whole original article here.
