By Tony Attwood
There is a commentary flashing around at the moment which claims that, “A new BBC Sport study analysing 29 match-altering VAR decisions has sparked fresh debate after claims Arsenal benefited from four crucial points during the Premier League season.”
This has sent quite a few media commentators into a frenzy of excitement with a general sense of “I told you so.” And yet once again, things are not quite as they seemed.
The first point is that the data we’ve seen so far doesn’t tell us if any of these four “crucial points” (whatever they were) actually altered a result. We might presume (but are not told) that they came in four separate games, so we might make a guess that Arsenal won four games each by a single goal. But we are now just guessing.
And that requires us to believe that the crucial point was in fact a single goal that gave Arsenal the victory, as well as making the assumption that there was no other crucial point in which a club playing Arsenal themselves gained a goal they should not have had.
It’s pretty feeble stuff, but let’s try and make something of it. In four games, something “crucial” happened to Arsenal’s advantage. That probably means Arsenal scored a goal, which turned a draw into a win, and thus Arsenal gained eight points by getting these wins, rather than draws.
But unless the media is alleging the bribery and corruption of PGMO officials, Arsenal are not the only club that benefits from crucial errors by refs. So let’s try and work out what might have happened.
Somewhere in the season, there must have been at least one crucial error that went against Arsenal, either allowing an opposition goal or stopping an Arsenal winner. Now obviously, there is no data available on this because we only have one bit of data for those making the allegations, but let’s just pick a game such as Wolverhampton 2 Arsenal 2 and take it that there was a mistake in terms of a Wolverhampton goal. So in fact Arsenal should have won that game and gained two points. So Arsenal’s extra eight points loss somewhere in the season is now down to six points.
But is this a valid assumption? Well, two factors suggest it is. One is, we don’t know how those critical errors affected the game – they might have made Arsenal press forward further for the winner, rather than back off and let the game play out.
Yet given that “The full judgements, seen by BBC Sport, show there were 25 VAR errors this season, up from the 18 in the 2024-25 campaign,” any one of them could have turned an Arsenal draw into an Arsenal win, such as in the match against Wolverhampton.
Now we also have the fact that the data for 2022/23 shows that “Arsenal should have conceded three penalties and received three red cards.” But there were 25 VAR errors in that season, according to the review, and they are arguing that six of these benefitted Arsenal.
Now this suggests a staggering level of either incompetence or bias by referees – something that we have been concerned about for years on this site – and yet we have had no support whatsoever from anyone else in our campaign to get this sorted out. (You might recall we have had a fair amount of correspondence telling us to shut up about referees, but we haven’t).
So we have two questions now. One is, did the referee errors actually benefit Arsenal in 2022/23? The answer is that it seems unlikely since Arsenal were nine points ahead of Manchester United that season. It would take a fair number of errors for Arsenal to lose enough points to slip down below Manchester United, so the issue made no difference.
What’s more, we don’t know if Manchester United themselves benefited in some way through referee errors, maybe by winning a game they should have drawn, and so that would take Arsenal back up the league, although in each case in second place.
In fact, worrying though these persistent referee errors are – and indeed they surely should be cause for a fulsome investigation into the whole way in which PGMO works – it would have made no difference to the league table.
So, to answer the question: did Arsenal cheat their way to second position? Even if all the errors worked in Arsenal’s favour (which really does seem extremely unlikely), there is still no suggestion that Arsenal cheated their way into second place.
The argument that Arsenal ended up in a higher league position than they should, because of this, is in fact a libel, and Arsenal have shown great restraint in not taking action against those in the media and elsewhere who have made this suggestion.
But we can still have concerns about referees and the way PGMO works – which is why we consistently ask for no referee to oversee any club in the PL more than twice in a season. And so obvious and logical is that point, surely the best question to ask here is, why are no journalists, or PGMO themselves, taking up this issue? Could it possibly be that a further investigation into the figures will show that other clubs are benefitting from these matters more than Arsenal?
There is one other thing. There were 38 VAR errors found in 2022/23. There were 31 VAR errors found in 2023/4. and there were 25 VAR errors in 2024/25. We don’t know the figure for 2025/6 as yet but the chances are with this trend there were probably about 18 errors.
Now Arsenal won the league by seven points. So that would mean that 22% of the referee errors last season were not only in Arsenal’s favour but actually resulted in Arsenal turning a draw into a win.
And so, you might want to ask, “Is that likely?” Or indeed “Is that what I saw?” And if so, how on earth were Arsenal managing to bribe a VAR official to give the wrong report in around a quarter of the matches he saw, each of which involved Arsenal, with the whole world watching?
And remember, the claim so far is that Arsenal benefited in the way that no other club did. This really is getting to a level of paranoid insanity, and can only be put forward by journalists because a) they aren’t very good at maths or b) they are giving the rest of the league a story they want to believe.
For what it is worth, I suspect it is the latter. In fact, I think this is generally the case now. Football journalists give their readers stories they want to read. And since most of their readers don’t like Arsenal winning things, we get “Arsenal are cheats” stories.
