Did Arsenal cheat their way to the title in 2025/26? We look for the evidence.

 

 

• If we had to be defeated somewhere, this is the one I’d have chosen
• What Arsenal will symbolise tonight to supporters across the world

By Tony Attwood

If anyone is going to be happy with yesterday’s defeat, it will be the bloggers and journalists who spent the last week telling us about how Arsenal cheated their way to the title via a long series of VAR decisions that changed games in Arsenal’s favour.  

This view leads to the notion that if referees and VAR had done their job properly, Arsenal would have come second, but Arsenal cheated, and the referees connived in this cheating.   Arsenal, in fact, were not very good; indeed, if they had been, they would have won the Champions League.

Unfortunately, football reporting is full of what is probably best described as “incomplete statements without evidence.”   And so it is worth considering what we really would need to have as evidence to accept this story about referees giving Arsenal a set of VAR decisions that helped them win the league.

Unfortunately, just knowing about the VAR decisions is not enough, however, because it can be argued that lots of clubs benefit or are harmed by wrong VAR decisions.   Arsenal might have had ten VAR decisions in their favour and five against them last season, giving them a benefit of +5 VAR decisions.  But without the figures for ManC, ManU and Liverpool, that still doesn’t tell us much.

Then we would need to be shown how many VAR decisions were wrong for each club.  Do Arsenal “get away with” more bad VAR decisions than other clubs?   I’ve not seen any evidence of that.  

So a significant amount of evidence is needed, and certainly it wasn’t reported..  However, this doesn’t mean that one cannot criticise referees – we do it all the time – but we use statistics, which is really the only evidence we have.  Stats show us that for example, while over 68% of Peter Bankes games resulted in home wins, only 33% of Craig Pawson’s games resulted in home wins.  And those figures are across the whole PL season – 21 games for Pawson and 22 games for Bankes.

Those are, of course, very simple statistics and again don’t prove corruption, but they suggest that different referees have different styles and approaches in matches, and that it could be helpful if these were investigated.

But the point about Arsenal being helped by referees and VAR is that it comes with no comparative evidence concerning referees and other clubs.  And yet it was widely distributed, perhaps leading some to believe that Arsenal cheated with the help of referees.

And supposing they were – how would this happen?   Did Arsenal bribe the referees?   If so, that suggests the whole PL system is utterly corrupt and one would ask why no one is investigating this if the evidence is so clear?   I mean, I don’t think Radio 5, Match of the Day, Sky or the other lot have actually ever mentioned this.   Are they being bribed by Arsenal to keep their mouths shut?  If so, how come Arsenal has such a hold over the whole football media?

Oh, and here’s another point.  We’ve asked for years for the number of referees to be increased so that each club is only seen twice in a season by the same referee.  Why are those people now complaining about how Arsenal are helped by referees not backing that campaign?

No, the real information we need is

a) how many referee errors are made in a season that affect the result of a game?

b) are those errors spread at random through the league, or do some teams gain and others suffer dramatically because of VAR interventions or non-interventions?

After all, it’s not much good pointing to one match where Arsenal allegedly got a win instead of a draw through a VAR mistake, if one doesn’t do it across the whole season and all clubs.

If it happens across all clubs, then that’s just referee incompetence.  If Arsenal benefited at the expense of everyone else, then that is bias; the evidence should be produced, including the number of right and wrong decisions for all clubs.  And it might be helpful to see any suggestion as to why referees were particularly inclined to take bribes from Arsenal, rather than other clubs.

As things stand, Arsenal had the best defence in the league last season – eight goals fewer conceded than ManC, and 19 goals fewer than the third best defence in the league, the best goal difference in the league and seven more points than the club in second place.   If that was all achieved by cheating, that is a lot of cheating and it should have been visible.

So, “Did VAR win Arsenal the league?” is the headline, and if we are fortunate enough to see another Arsenal league win next season, and once more without comparative stats.  (And as most of us know, conclusions without any statistics are generally not very reliable).  

But perhaps the biggest problem is the way schools teach statistics, with some people leaving school not realising exactly what data is needed to prove or disprove a proposition.  Not knowing that is helpful since it allows all sorts of wild accusations to be made.  Although generally they don’t have much to do with reality.