By Walter Broeckx
Dear Untold readers, (and also Dear new readers who visit us over here for the first time),
Welcome to a new series of articles that we are about to present you. In the next days and weeks you will be able to see what is more or less top secret. Untold will give you evidence on how things stand when it comes to referees in the Premier League.
Our hard working team of referee reviewers have been reviewing game after game of this season in the PL. They have been judging games from the first till the last minute. And all those reports have been put online during the season so that everyone could have a look at what we found.
We named and judged each incident in the games we reviewed. And all the data from these games has been put together in an attempt to judge the referees and the PGMOL (the shadowy organisation that runs the refs in the PL) and to see how teams have been doing under the refs they got.
The season before last season this website made a first attempt to do this. We then did all the Arsenal games from that season. That was 10% of all the Premier League games. At the end of that season people said to us that to gain more credibility we had to come up with more data. We had to do games that involved other teams apart from Arsenal. So we took on this challenge to do more.
And we went further. In fact I think we went further than ever before. In a few lines I will tell you how far we have been going but I can tell you now that I think what this blog has done is that it has written history.
Other sites have been doing things about referees. But no other site has done things the way we done it. An open way of working. With all the numbers, all the decisions open to the audience. We didn’t come up with a final score asking the people to believe us. No we showed each decisions, each judgement, each call or non-call and said what was wrong.
As you will know there are 10 games each match day of the season. And there are 38 matches to be played by each team. So the total numbers of games played in the PL each season is 380 games.
And we, that is the referees who had dedicated all their spare time to this project have been working hard. We have been working like mad. And the final outcome is well even for me amazing. At first I hoped we would be able to double our games. From 38 to 76 games. And I then secretly dreamed of reaching the magical number of doing 100 games in a season. Well we all can dream can we.
But thanks to the gigantic and unseen devotion from the ref reviewers I now can proudly say that we have surpassed not only my first dream but even my big dream of doing 100 games.
When I saw the final number I must admit that I hardly could believe it. And I must say that I really was very excited about it. Very, very excited.
So here it is our team of ref reviewers has reviewed 155 PL games this season. And if you got your calculators close to you and you start calculating you will see that this is 40.78947368421053 % of all the PL games of last season.
Yes Untold Arsenal has managed to review more than 40% of all the PL games. That is an average of 4 games each day. I must say that there is no prouder referee reviewer out there than me – and my little team of ref reviewers.
All the numbers have been gathered, written down, sorted, looked at, checked and examined to see how it all relates with each other. We have put them in a big database and then it was time for a specialist to dig something from those numbers.
All this will be presented to you in the next days and weeks.
If you still want to laugh at us, if you want to say that we are rubbish at what we do, fine. But also, why don’t you show to us where we are wrong? Why don’t you show us your data? Why don’t you show us your numbers?
If you have more data fine. If you have more numbers fine. Open them up and show them to the world. And then we can debate what you have found. If you don’t have this then I think you just have to accept that what we gathered is the most detailed referee reviewing in the PL ever in history beyond the secret numbers gathered by PGMOL or the FA.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank all who have been involved in this. And who have made this possible. Tony for opening his blog to us, my little team of ref reviewers and of course the one and only Dogface for doing the work behind the scenes and if you see nice graphics and tables, they are from his hands.
So Untold has written history by doing what we did. I invite you to read history in the next days and weeks. I invite you to read what never has been done before in the open way we did it. Join us in our search to see how the refs have done in the last season.
We will start this series with an introduction to explain to you how we came to all this and the road we have walked since a few years. I hope you enjoy the series. I hope you will enjoy it as much as we did it while doing the reviews.
And remember when you look at the numbers: we have analysed over 40% of all the PL games this season, second by second, and on that basis we draw our conclusions.
Check this website in the next days as the series will start very soon now.
- The final reviews that completed the series…
- The last ref review: Wigan 4 Newcastle 0. Now for the fun
- Ref Review: Newcastle 2 Tottenham 2 – Ref: V Good
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Other stories
- 2012/13 month by month
- It’s Patrick Vieira’s birthday
- Ray Parlour and Martin Keown will play in the FA Cup this season
- Uefa is racist and by association so is the FA
- Robin Van Persie, match fixing and ice creams
- How much longer do we really have to wait?
- Arsenal Euro Watch: group stage round up
- Sylvain Wiltord, a tribute
- Farewell Nic Bendtner – it wasn’t so bad as some make out.
- Did The City sack Harry Redknapp.
Great stuff. Have you sent this to any press?
Goid job to Walter and co. Hopefully the result could reveal something that we thought we knew. Respect to the ref reviewers.
Aye – good job. Bring it on, Walter & Co.
That is a seriously high percentage of games – fabulous work!
Thanks Walter and team for a great job
Thanks Walter and team for a great job ! Look forward to the final results
Thanks Walter and team. Yeah stupendous effort…irrespective of who agree or dont agree with the conclusions.
Now the fun really starts. Great job Walter and team. Thanks.
Hopefully it/they will get picked up by the mainstream media. I’d even look at The Mirror or The Sun if they ran with it!
Reviewing 40% of the games in a single season minute by minute with action, reaction and the possible correct action must be one hell of a job. Its high time your hard work bears its fruits.
I really wish and hope things go main stream media pretty soon.
hats off to all the ref reviewers! thank you for the hard work and long hours you all put it. i have been enjoying the reviews all season…looking forward to some of the final analysis.
walter, will you be continuing this work next season?
I hope these findings will be delivered to the FA.The latter should take immediate action against errant refs.The ref in the Stoke Bolton game was,imho,responsible for consigning the trotters to relegation.The cost to Bolton are very high..And what happens to the ref?
He will probably officiate another game.This is akin to letting a suspected paedophile on the loose and prey on more kids.
Walter and reviewers – the season before last when you reviewed all the Arsenal matches I felt that you demonstrated clearly that there was an EPL ref bias against Arsenal. Some contributors guinely wanted a broader pool of evidence – some others were perhaps being mischievous in the request for additional coverage.
However, this last season, after a magnificent effort, reviewing 155 games, no-one can complain that the scope of the overall review is too narrow. I look forward to the final conclusions – will the balance of correct and incorrect ref decisions balance out in the end?
Once again, well done guys!
great job, highly appreciated. cant wait.
What an achievement, well done to you and your team, I look forward to your conclusions.
Bloody hell Mr Broeckx. I’ve just read the longest advert in history. History in the making?
hope you blow open all the news wires with this fantastic work, well done and many thanks to everyone at UNTOLD the only true football debate on the web. THX THX THX
Unbelievably amazing! To do such a huge work… wow! You guys are truly unbelievable. Thank you so much for your great work and please, keep it up.
Well done Walter & Co! All our collective hats are taken off to your team.
fantastic work.
Well done Walter and Co! That’s a lot of hardwork and purely for the love of Arsenal and the game…hats off to the gang. We would atleast need to send it to the PGMOL…
Blimey, Walter & Co! That many games? Well done lads. Now you keep me salivating for the concluding fall-out. By the way, Does that word (fall-out) have a plural form?
I would like to link the article on my Facebook account to get it more coverage – would there be any objection to me doing that?
Matt, not at all…not at all.
Thanks Walter. Just got to remember now how to do it :S
Amazing job ref reviewers, and I can’t wait! I’ve never been prouder to be a part of this site.
Great job Walter and his team, so proud I’ve been a regular reader on this site for almost 2 years now.
Btw, regarding the future of referring, this makes me sick and angry: http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/3284/euro-2012/2012/06/26/3202467/platini-introducing-goal-line-technology-would-be-a
I mean Platini is Platini, UEFA and all the crap, but some people in the comments section actually think that referee mistakes (caused by corruption in some cases) make the game exciting and all the anger and disappointment caused by them create space for an amazing discussion after the match where we as fans can moan and complain and apparently it’s just great
I have no words for that…
the graphics Dogface has been making are stunning. Well for me they are 🙂 Who ever is on twitter or facebook or on any other social media you should advertise us a bit when we start in the next days. It really really is amazing and some surprise things included also…
If you hear someone signing ‘I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it….’ then it’s probably me 😉
Well done to the ref reviews, looks like a lot of hard work has gone into this.