REF REVIEW 2012: Queens Park Rangers – “These numbers are mind blowing”

177 Replies to “REF REVIEW 2012: Queens Park Rangers – “These numbers are mind blowing””

1. Walter, Dogface – this is where the explosions start.

   An amazing report which once again I am honoured to be able to include on our site.

   Thank you so much. This is just amazing.

2. I find it totally unbelievable that seine could sit down and gather all this information,sad doesn’t even begin to cover it.what is the conclusion? is it that QPR cheated their way through the seaon?or are you trying to insinuate that these refs gave them an easy ride on the sponsors orders? Ridiculous!I strongly suggest that you find some freinds and start to get a life.Unbelievable!

3. This is fascinating. I’d like to thank you guys for your hard work.

   Interesting facts:
   in matches 9, 19 and 31 the refs were very nice to QPR.
   Match 9 was vs Chelsea. Matches 19 and 31 though…

   You won’t need three guesses. They were v’s Arsenal.

   And in matches 10, 11 and 32 when QPR got done over a bit more by the refs, they were Away to Spurs, Home to Man City and Away to Man U respectively.

   I thought nothing stank worse than my old trainers but the PGMOL seems to be the exception.

   Once again thanks to Walter, Dogface and all the reviewers who went through the matches. This is great stuff.

   Me and my cousin will certainly have something to talk about down the pub, I lost my season ticket when I got made redundant but he’s been going for 23 years now.

4. Well just goes to show that stats are not everything.

   If you honestly believe refs are biased towards QPR becuase of sponsorship based on 8 games you are seriously blinkered.

   I guess this doesn’t take into account the goal( a yard over the line) never given against Bolton which in and of itself could have been the single most expensive decision made by a referee and his assistants if Bolton had beaten Stoke in the last game of the season. I could rattle off 4 single appaling decisions by referees last season that cost the club 10 points in total but can’t remember any single decisions that gained QPR points.

   If you’r article is there to pinpoitn how god awful most of the referees are in the Premiership that’s one thing, but to suggest that Tune groups sponsorship of referees is responsible for that in favour of QPR is close to being libellous.

5. Unbelievable numbers. Dean again – someone really should be looking into him. I know they did before with his suspension over links to a betting company. Atkinson too – seems to have how can I put it – a certain West London leaning

6. B Lucas – how to make yourself look very silly in one go.

   Take a look at the reviews!

   Tony

7. well mate
   i was at every game qpr played last season. and i totally disagree with all your colourful charts.

   The decisions that went against us in 95% of games cost us highly. And most of the decisions were so blantant it was untrue.

   But these type of comments i would expect from Arsenal supporters being as you dont want to win anything only play good football. Well i watched you a few times last year and i didnt see much good football. only got 1 player take him out and noone else can score.
   bye Bye

8. I’m a statistician and while I appreciate the hard work that’s gone into this I’m sorry but the analysis proves nothing. You can’t just say “this number is bigger than that one” – it could be random variation. You need to look at distributions of data too, need to have confidence intervals, P values, etc. Without them the numbers are meaningless. I’d be very surprised, given the small sample size, if any of the numbers shown were significant.

   At the very least, you need to perform the exact same analysis for every single club, and look at how they vary. If all the other clubs were at one end of the spectrum and QPR at the other then I’d say yes, it’s worth looking into further. But the chances are that there’s a random spread of results across the teams and QPR just happen to be towards ine end of the scale. You haven’t shown that there are no other clubs with more extreme results than QPR. To single them out for analysis like this is pretty shocking.

9. I agree that, at the very least this ought to be, as you say, of great concern to PGMOL, EPL and the FA; because of the sponsor issue.

   That is if it is nothing more than coincidence. If what you have observed is more than that then it is of grave concern to all football lovers.

   I hope that some QPR fans can come on and add anecdotal support for the ref’s performance in all the others games. (Honest-hearted fans, of course).

10. (My comment was started before steveqpr’s post was up. I am not insiuating that he is not honest).

11. I’m a QPR fan and find this very interesting.

    I don’t think its the sponsorship personally because I don’t think the sponsors have anything to do with the individual referees. It would be a huge conspiracy that would have somehow been spoken about if it was the case. I think Tony Fernandes did talk about this and has planned to end his sponsorship of referees which he had started well before he took over as QPR Chairman.

    I wonder how much Home advantage has to play. I mean we have the smallest ground but it is right on top of the pitch and can still be pretty intimidating at times, whether that has an effect on just the players or the referees too who knows, they’re all human.

    I remember a few offside goals but also some big decisions that went against us. Silly sending offs and a big decision against Bolton for a goal that was and wasn’t given.

    Overall Football is an unfair game if you look at how much money is spent by some teams. Short of a draft system similar to NFL or a completely Home Grown youth system I’m not sure it could ever be fair.

12. Reading throughhis t I’m struggling to make sense of it. A lot of paragraphs seem to be missing as its full of non sequiturs.

    It’s also missing all the paragraphs that explain what all the Acronyms are supposed to stand for, how the stats are calculated, the definitions of the weightings, of “high, medium and low”, and the impact each decision has on the outcome of the game, which is INCREDIBLY difficult to calculate even if you factor in the time of the game, the score at the time and any number of other factors which are difficult to consider even if you’re there watching the game when making the notes .

    Some of the missing pieces of information can be guessed, while others look quite important and areng’t explained. And if you’re using data to assess the effects on one particular team you absolutely have to have the corresponding information for everyone else. You also need to eliminate a lot of the variables. If playing against Arsenal is a factor, then you need to assess EVERY team who got decisions against Arsenal and compare those decisions to the decisions they got against everyone else, as well as against QPR. Similarly you need to look at the teams who got fewer decisions against Arsenal than they should have.

    Now I’m not saying the data necessarily hasn’t been analyised, but the analysis is not included here. I’d like to assess it objectively, but presented like that I just can’t.

13. Completely disagree with your report. I attended every QPR home game and the referee desicions appeared biased towards the opposition.
    With respect to some away games, a blatent goalthat crossed the line that wasn’t given against Bolton and an amazing Referee descision at Old Trafford that awarded Utd a penalty and saw Derry sent off.
    Talking of Red cards, QPR had the worst red card record in the EPL. 50% of thoe sendings off were due to poor discipline from QPR players after a very heavy tackle and provocation from the opposition which in most instances went unpunished for the opposing player
    So instead of spinning stats and accusing our Sponsors of favouring the Rangers, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why the top 6 teams in the division get privileged decisions

14. Intresting…as are his last lot of tweets

    https://mobile.twitter.com/UsmanovOfitsial

15. Excellent work and I’m grateful someone is doing such hard work. We always knew there was something fishy going on with our refereeing but it’s good to see it black on white. I hope this is the beginning of a change in a right direction. Some of the bloggers are obviously waking up to the fact there is a thing like corruption in football ( what, in this country? never!) and it’s not just Italy or Sep Blatter and Platini’s mates, come on guys!
    QPR fans not need to worry if a change come, it will be to the betterment of football. So lets not worry and open this can of worms.

16. Just off the top of my head.

    Clint Hill “goal” disallowed (wrongly) against Bolton.Cost us the match.

    Sean Wright Philip goal of the season contender disallowed (wrongly) against WBA ,cost us the match.

    Barton sent off (wrongly) against Norwich,cost us the match.

    Cisse sent off against Wolves after for retaliating ,after being persistently fouled (not even a yellow shown to Wolves) cost us the match.

    Danny Graham’s blatent handball,not being called ,to set up his equaliser for Swansea,cost us the match.

    Those handfull of wrong refereeing decisions cost QPR 11 points.Stick that on your pie charts.

17. I am a QPR ST holder and I can in all good conscience say that I have not noticed a bias towards us from refs. I suspect most fans feel generally hard done by from officials but I have seen some tragic performances from refs that have given us very little. Naturally there are the headline grabbers like Clint Hill’s disallowed goal at Bolton, Joey Barton’s (first) sending off and the pen at ManU, but there are plenty of other woeful decisions that have punctuated our season. I can also confirm that I have been pleasantly surprised by some poor decisions going in our favour, sadly non of these, from my rose tinted memory, have been game changers. As for a conspiracy, I seriously doubt that a referee has any thought of who the sponsor is during the cauldron of a game, one explanation could be the ‘Bear Pit” atmosphere which is generated by home fans that may influence the refs, I hope so cos it’s much better fun than watching football in a library. Hope this helps and those graphs are very pretty x

18. I live in Wales and watch QPR home and away, missing just 3 games last season. I travel with my two grown up children and don’t drink so I consider myself in a good position to comment on this article.

    To suggest that there has been bias TOWARDS QPR is nothing short of astounding!

    QPR had 9 sendings off – a record for the Premier League – and many of these were for less offences than many others which went without even a yellow at other clubs. The Shaun Derry sending off at Old Trafford for the Ashley Young dive is a prime example. It wasn’t even a foul and QPR were punished with the loss of a man and a converted penalty inside 20 mins. I seem to remember stating at the time that the referee couldn’t wait to get his card out and had given the penalty and red card before Young had even hit the ground.

    QPR were denied a goal at Bolton when Clint Hill’s header was three feet over the line – that goal would and should have given QPR a deserved lead but instead Boltn went on to get all three points again against 10 men.

    QPR were denied a perfectly good goal when Shaun Wright Phillips was adjudged offside at home against WBA which would have wrapped up 3 points – instead a 1-1 draw and replays showing a very poor decision.

    QPR were coasting at home against Wolves and saw Cisse sent off for reacting to a leg breaking challenge – no punishment for the challenge and 50 minutes with 10 men saw Wolves score 2 and take all 3 points.

    QPR were coasting against Norwich and a goal t the good when Joey Barton rode 3 attempts to hack him down and leant into the offender when making his displeasure at the challenge known. Now don’t get me wrong – I am not a Barton fan, far from it – but this was not a sending off and again the challenge against us went un punished and again 10 v 11 saw 2 goals conceded and another loss.

    Match of The Day pundits berated the officials in both the Barton and Derry cases and yet the FA dismissed both appeals leading to bans in further games.

    In the FA Cup match against Chelsea QPR were beaten by a penalty decision which was also described as laughable as Dean Sturridge threw himself to the ground metres away from a ball which he could not get.

    Against Everton at home in March a game which ended in a 1-1 draw QPR were refused two blatant penalties as both SWP and Nedam Onouha were tripped inside the box late on.

    On the flip side – we definitely got the rub of the green in the home game against Chelsea, but that’s it. These stats may even reflect that the ‘easy’ decisions (ie free kicks on the half way line) might have gone in QPR’s favour BUT the big decisions definitely went against QPR and definitely cost us many points.

    So an amazing report – yes I agree – for it’s complete in accuracy regarding the impact of ‘important and game changing decisions’ and sensationalises the impact of minor decisions many of which were probably given after the referees had made there clangers. Sorry half a dozen free kicks on the half way line don’t make up for a dissallowed goal, goal against or a sending off.

    Darren

19. Quite frankly I find this ridiculous, whilst there may have been the odd decision that could have gone either way (a 50:50 if you like) there were many more that did not. If you’d like a list of refereeing errors that could have cost us dearly then here you go:
    – SWP goal vs WBA ruled off, incorrectly, as offside. At this point we were 1 nil up and ended up drawing 1-1 (2 points lost).
    – Clint Hill goal vs Bolton declared as having not crossed the line when it did, by a good yard. Went on to lose 2-1 (1 point lost and 2 gained by a relegation rival).
    – Joey Barton sent of vs Norwich for a “headbutt” when winning 1-0 and in complete control off the game. (Arguably 3 points lost).
    – Shaun Derry sent off again Man U for a “foul” on Ashley Young. Derry barley laid a hand on Young, who was offside anyway. Realistically a club like QPR does not go to Man U expecting any return, but this was at the same time that they lost to Wigan so who knows.
    In addition, if you take into account the effect of the suspensions from the two above incidents then I think we’ve been badly screwed over by referee’s and officials this season.

20. The scandal of refs in this country has not broken yet. We British tend to be gentlemanly and give the benefit of the doubt where possible. The truth is that our country is as corrupt as most just more subtle. Our bankers have breached laws to enrich themselves and rip us off. Our politicians rack up gifts and expense claims that are ludicrous, even the prime minister charges £100,000 to go to dinner at Downing st.

    The truth is that technology is available to ensure that officials are kept as straight as possible if FIFA, UEFA and the FA don’t want to use it they have to be questioned hard by the media and fans. They must be the ones that answer. When the debate splinters into this or that club benefiting you break down the support and create barriers in what should be a united front bringing technology to the sport at the highest level.

21. did your research discover what team was given the most red cards in the PL last season? Thought not. Such a pointless and badly presented review. Is this a GCSE project?
    The only thing this investigation has proved, is that you are an illiterate moron incapable of stringing a sentence together.

22. To start with its not the EPL it’s the Barclays premier league, secondly I am a season ticket holder at loftus rd and also went to several away games and saw the rest on tv or via a stream, if you had of reviewed every game we played then you would of seen that we were shafted most weeks, the only conclusion from your stats above is that you probably spend the rest of the year playing world of war craft, never in the history of the world wide web has such bollocks been spouted.

23. Ps The work you guys do is amazing. Thank you very much

24. One can only assume that Bolton v QPR, QPR v West Brom (where Martin Atkinson disallowed two perfectly good QPR goals) and QPR v Chelsea FA Cup (where Mike Dean incorrectly awarded a game winning penalty to the visitors) weren’t included in the sample.
    The insinuation that QPR are favoured because our shirt sponsor is the same as the referees’ let’s the report down further.

25. Oh and I find it unsurprising that you found the referee’ing to be bias in the two games against yourselves, but the one against Chelsea? Really? Boswingwa was the last man back and fouled SWP, straight red, letter of the law. Drogba then went in two footed, again a straight red offence according to the rules.
    The penalty, I will grant you, was one of those 50:50’s I was saying about, some you get some you don’t. That’s down to the ref on the day and what he see’s, not who he’s bloody sponsored by. And if you care to get your facts correct, Chelsea were awarded an even softer penalty against us in the FA cup. There you go, one each, 50:50.
    Maybe try assessing your article with some objectivity.

26. Honestly you gooners get a life for gods sake Qpr were really hard done by refs last season on lots of occasions . Just because we beat you get over it .

27. What a load of rubbish, why don’t you design some graphs and charts on how many times Arsenal have bottled winning anything in the last 7yrs. You guys have too much time on your hands.

28. This must be amongst the most ridiculously poor, badly researched and useless piece of research I have ever seen! Stats, as applied to football are notoriously rubbish throwing up such gems as England being the 4the best team in the World currently and Leon Britten being a better, or at least more effective passer than Xavi! Please!! And research of such a tiny amount of matches makes this trash stink even more! QPR suffered a goal not being given at Bolton, Shaun Derry being sent off for a non contact foul at Man Utd and an outrageous sending off of, admittedly serial fuckwit, Joey Barton against Norwich when cheating scumbag Bradley someone or other was shot from the stand by a sniper! Then there was the Sturridge offside goal at Stamford Bridge that started the collapse against the Blue Menace! Need I go on? I suggest the authors of this garbage go out a bit more often or at least try to get a girlfriend!!

29. tremendous work. I hope if nothing else comes of this you are able to get all of next seasons games reported on for a more comprehensive report – with what I fear will emerge as a damning trend showing favouring towards certain teams. Time will tell.

30. JC–the result of Bolton vs Stoke may indeed suggest that someone was looking out for QPR. No way Bolton should have lost; there was a dodgy diving PK and the Bolton keeper was rugby tackled over the line for the other goal. Half decent officiating would have seen a Bolton win–but the crap officiating we saw effectively kept QPR up.

31. Have been waiting for this, will digest this a bit more. Shame you didn’t go after them once the connection with Fernandez and the Tune group was announced. He really wanted West Ham though. Maybe try to do all Fernandez’s games next season if possible. Keep an eye on West Ham’s progress as well. They will be cheape to buy if their not in the Prem.

32. Why hasn’t my last post appeared?

33. El gringo, relegation is decided over 38 games, if you want to get picky then QPR’s non goal at Bolton cost Qpr 3 points which would of made the last games irrelevant, or how about Shaun wright Phillips having a goal chalked off for off side when he was a yard on.

34. There are lies, damn lies and statistics!! All you have proven is that if you want to you can skew statistics to suit any argument you want. You picked 5 games from a season – in a season where all unbiased fans recognized that QPR were on the wrong end of terrible ref decisions week in week out. You chose 5 games that makes it look like QPR were favoured. That is a ridiculous conclusion and shows that this website cannot be taken seriously

35. The only thing ‘mind blowing’ is the stupidity of this so called article.

    How long did it take to put together? That’s time the two authors will never get back.

36. Complete rubbish.
    I went to most games away and every home game last season for QPR, the referring was mostly abysmal.
    Let me educate you.

    SWP – vs WBA – stunning volley scored ruled out for offside , proved incorrect by replays, 2 dropped points

    Derry – vs Man United – sent off and penalty awarded against us, replays show no foul even, potential point dropped

    Hill – vs Bolton – goal 3 yards over, not given 3 points dropped as we would have gone on to win that.

    Traore – vs Villa – penalty given against us , replays showing no touch and never a penalty

    Hill – vs Chelsea (FA cup) brushed Sturridge who dived , penalty given

    Man City away, how they scored 6 minutes into 5 minutes of injury time?

    Aston Villa away – worst performance I have ever seen from a referee, watch back that game and tell me I’m wrong.

    Swansea away – Their goal, included Danny Graham catching the ball with 3 handballs before he score. NOT seen / given by any official, 2 points dropped.

    We stayed up because we showed unbelievable home for in second half of the season, and certainly NOT due to referees , if they had performed, we would have been safe long before the final game of the season.

    Howard Webb I saw ref us twice and he was far and away the best ref we had last season, and one was against United.

    Your stats may say what they say, but your QPR conclusion, is completely incorrect I’m afraid.

37. Truly truly sad study, clearly you went into this hoping to find bias against arsenal and for whatever reason also hoping to find bias toward QPR, and … shocker … you found it! Or did you just find evidence supporting your meme, out of a disgracefully small sample size, because thats exactly what you were seeking. We tend to hear what we want to hear and find the evidence we want to find when we are blinkered and biased, I’d ask to see how you determined how calls were categorized but frankly I dont think your explanation would make any more sense and it could never be trusted anyway.

    Utterly biased and frankly quite sad, that you would go to such lengths to attempt to prove a conspiracy that every group of supporters claims at one time or other yet can never be conclusively proved because it does not exist.

38. @El Gringo.

    OMG! you lot make me laugh so much. How anyone can form any opinion based on stats from 8 matches is hilarious.

    Not only that but out of the 3 matches you say favoured QPR, 2 of them had match deciding bad decisions against QPR. WBA where SWP’s goal was clearly not offside and should have stood, and Bolton away where Clint Hill’s goal a yard over the line not given.

    Seriously!

    Only a gooner can come up with this crap and take himself seriously.

39. Sorry, but this report is a load of crap.
    I watched all of QPR’s games,and apart from 1 game, all the major incidents, went against QPR..ie goals that weren’t given,red cards etc.
    I am not being biased,but last season was the worst for bad Refereeing against QPR that ive ever seen.

40. Thanks JC. I’m glad I could brighten your day by bringing laughter.

    BTW, eight games isn’t enough. I never said it was and I thoroughly agree with Walter’s appeals for more ref reviewers (not being a ref myself). (mostly, being a goalkeeper, I’m aggrieved on the part of Adam Bogdan and any keeper getting fouled by Stoke!). I myself didn’t get a chance to watch QPR last season, so I really have no opinion one way or the other there. However, I did want to be the devil’s advocate given the circumstances of the Bolton/Stoke match, and I’d be interested to hear your comment on that point.

    Can we at least agree, JC, that PL officiating is far below standard, regardless of which direction potential biases operate?

41. @QPR Fans – we did only review 20% of your games. Do you have access to the video for the other 80%?

    If so – then let us have access and we’ll try and get a few more done and it might be as you say… until then – this is all we have to work with.

42. You guys really are losers!
    Ugh.

43. I am afraid that the reaction shown by JC and B Lucas suggests that it will be almost impossible for this tremendous work to gain any credibility outside of Arsenal supporters (and possibly those fans of a couple of other teams who have suffered at the hands of the referees). The truth is that virtually all fans are totally blinkered when push comes to shove. They nearly all think that they get the shitty end of the stick, all the bad decisions and all the bad luck. They remember all the things that go against them whilst forgetting the things that go for them, and this I am afraid is the big obstacle we have to overcome if this work is to be given the credibility it deserves.

44. please post my earlier comment will be interesting to see your Arsenal responses
    Thanks

45. It’s well known at QPR that refs will look after us due to the sponsorship deal. It’s been arranged that there will be a few very high profile “errors” that go against us but that these will be more than balanced by the things that do go our way. I’m afraid there’s nothing that can be done about it; money talks. I’m not sure what Arsenal have done to upset the FA but the arrangement is that they will be on the receiving end of more incorrect decisions than most.

46. The credibility that this work deserves ranks alongside McFly as a serious rock and roll outfit.
    Apply this sort of effort to something that needs doing.
    Buy a goat for a Ugandan village and take it there yourselves, along with a cataract surgeon.
    Ugh
    Paranoid time wasters…

47. I think the accuracy of your summary is best described by the fact that the comments section under the ref reviews often do not agree with the reviewer either. As it’s a subjective thing people will always disagree.

    Dogface – I think you miss the point, it’s not about having access to the other 80% of video’s but realising that it’s not even worth starting unless you have 100% of the games to review. Your statistics are floored and worthless.

    El Gringo – I think QPR fans view of the Bolton/Stoke match is basically that it was karma for the disallowed goal against Bolton when we played them.

    I’d like to see the full list of 8 games reviewed. Interesting to note that the Derry red card would have been reviewed, what weighting would that have got or is there a special weighting for spectacularly ridiculous? If so you can add the Hill disallowed goal, SWP disallowed goal and Bartons red card against Norwich.

48. qpr fan home and away season ticket holder

    My opinion on referees is they have a tough job under pressure but some of the the decisions I witnessed last year was un- real. Clint hill’s goal v Bolton not given , Shaun wright Phillips goal v WBA not given ,Shaun Derry sent off v man u but too say it’s cause the ref’s are sponsored by the tune group is a tad harsh I believe all ref’s were as bad right across the whole of last season arsenal probably got decisions the shouldn’t of had yet didn’t get some you should of had

49. So let me get this right. You had a panel of refs watch video of QPR games and point out where they would have disagreed with the actual refereeing decisions? And this panel of refs Are part of untold Arsenal? So Arsenal fans then? How is this different to every other fan in the EPL debating/discussing ref performance? For this to be effective, the video panel have to have the same view of the game as the actual ref, ie on the pitch. With players obstructing their view. Making decisions over something that happens in the blink of an eye. Without the support of tv, unlike rugby and cricket.

    Mate, your facts aren’t actually facts then are they. I am going to print this off and give it to my kids to wipe their bums on….

50. Another thing I forgot too add is some of the decisions that ref’s made against qpr were correct both of cisse’s sending off etc

51. Mick, I don’t think it’s rose tinted spectacles that stop the work gaining credibility. The authors freely admit the sample size isn’t ideal, and yet go on to describe the figures as “mind blowing” and allege (borderline libel) that QPR are favoured by Premiership referees because a company owned by our chairman sponsors their shirts. To make such allegations I’d expect a sample of 80% minimum – I appreciate why that’s not possible, I appreciate that a lot of work went into this, but with the limitations of the study it’s unfair to reach such drastic conclusions.

    Let’s say they’d picked another eight QPR games. Let’s say the survey was done on the following games:

    Aston Villa H, Sunday September 25 – Villa have a penalty incorrectly awarded in their favour which is scored, a short time later Alan Hutton deliberately handles a goalbound header on the line and the referee misses it. Should have finished 2-0 to QPR, actually finished 1-1. Referee was Michael Oliver.

    West Brom H, Saturday December 3 – Already leading 1-0 QPR score a perfectly legal second goal through Shaun Wright-Phillips that is incorrectly disallowed for offside. Should have won 2-1, actually drew 1-1. Referee was Martin Atkinson.

    Arsenal A, Saturday December 31 – Lost 1-0 to a goal from Robin Van Persie which was scored when QPR should have actually been at the other end preparing a corner that the linesman and referee Martin Atkinson incorrectly awarded as a goal kick. Lost 1-0, should have drawn 0-0.

    Norwich H, Monday January 2 – Leading 1-0 QPR are reduced to ten men when goalscorer Joey Barton is sent off in the first half for squaring up to Bradley Johnson. They lose 2-1. The sending off is debatable, Johnson clearly made a lot of it but by the letter of the law perhaps it was correct. What is not debatable is the fact that ten seconds before the incident Johnson deliberately kicked out at Barton as he ran past him, so should at the very least have been sent off himself. What’s also not debatable is that referee Neil Swarbrick and linesman Dave Richardson were initially happy for QPR to play on in possession of the ball for a good 10-15 seconds before play was stopped for another incident and then, after the officials were surrounded by Norwich players, Barton was sent off. If Barton’s offence was so severe as to warrant a red card, and Johnson’s so meagre as to warrant nothing, why were QPR allowed to play on in possession? Why wasn’t play stopped and Norwich awarded a free kick? Is it fair to assume that perhaps the officials guessed based on Barton’s reputation, and the reaction of Johnson and the Norwich players?

    Chelsea H, FA Cup, Saturday January 28. Lost 1-0 to a penalty that was won by Daniel Sturridge who, replays show, was not touched by Clint Hill in the incident. Lost 1-0, should have drawn 0-0 and gone to replay. Referee was Mike Dean.

    Aston Villa A, Wednesday February 1. No big, score decisions wrong in this one per se but in 97 minutes of football QPR were awarded two free kicks. Two. What makes this game interesting is that the referee was Neil Swarbrick, who was dropped from the Premiership list for five weeks after the Norwich game I mentioned earlier. After serving his time in the lower leagues he returned and was immediately given a QPR game again. And in that game we were given two free kicks in 97 minutes. Two.

    Bolton A, Saturday March 10. Martin Atkinson again, who the authors of this report say favours QPR and yet has already cost us two goals and three points in this sample of matches. Clint Hill scores a perfectly good goal in the first half which is missed by the officials, QPR are also denied a clear penalty in injury time at the end of the game. They equalise through an offside goal from Djibril Cisse and lose 2-1, had that been disallowed and the penalty been awarded and scored they’d have drawn 2-2.

    Man Utd A, Sunday April 8. Ashley Young, three yards offside, dives in the penalty area and is awarded a spot kick by Lee Mason who also sends off Shaun Derry into the bargain. QPR lose 2-0. As a further interesting side note you won’t find Lee Mason refereeing any games involving Bolton Wanderers because he is from Bolton, is the chairman of the Bolton Referees Association, is a season ticket holder at Bolton and his younger brother used to play for Bolton. It is however, apparently, acceptable for him to referee the teams that Bolton are directly competing with at the bottom of the league – as was the case here.

    I’m not being a smart arse here – well, I am a bit – I’m merely pointing out that to reach such drastic conclusions from a sample of eight matches is irresponsible. If you’d taken my sample of eight games you’d draw the conclusion that QPR are unfairly persecuted, particularly by Martin Atkinson.

    I understand why the sample is only eight games, and this article is the basis of a good start into an investigation, but as it is just eight games the credibility of it is close to zero.

52. I’m sorry, but what a load of bollocks. Which eight games were used in the sample? We got fucked by referees on multiple occasions- the Lee Mason one being the most high-profile but Clint Hill’s ludicrously disallowed header to go 1-0 up in a match lost, Shaun Wright-Phillips disallowed goal at home to West Brom to put us 2-0 up in a match then drawn, Barton’s ridiculous red card which the officials literally guessed on when 1-0 up which finished 1-2 and more. Most of our problems last season were of our own making but you can’t tell me we got so much in our favour to distort our league position. If we got the rub of the green at home towards the end of the season, which I don’t honestly think we did from memory, then the atmosphere would have been a factor, not that I’d expect an Arsenal fan to know an awful lot about that.

53. You also discredit any of this ‘research’ by calling the league the ‘EPL’. It’s not.

54. Josh,
    you discredit anything you have said by this last comment 😉

    I don’t advertise crooks 😉

55. Is this guy on acid? Swp goal got disalowed ,clint hills obvious goal that was all the papers, shaun derrys red card even tho it was obvious young dived. Bartons red for a headbutt that didn’t happen. If anything the refs was against us we should have not been in a last day dog fight yet we was because of poor officials. Biased towards qpr get a grip

56. Great to see people from QPR coming over to dispute this article.

    My first question is: who of the people commented on here are refs?
    If there are any please step forward and make yourself known. And then: JOIN US!!!

57. Glad we got to a second page on this as my youngest needs another sheet of bum wad…

58. By quickly reading through the comments I notice a lot call us ‘biased’. I don’t mind you say this but well as QPR fans yourself you are of course free of all bias?

    I know the system is not perfect and for those who would have taken the trouble to look further and try to read a few things before commenting you would have found that there are some things mentioned in the series and that we agree with this not being the total picture.

    But as we are only doing this in the way we do it for the first season with a small team with not all the possibilities we would love to have at our disposal, we agree that we don’t have enough data.
    But we try to draw some conclusions BASED ON THE GAMES WE REVIEWED!
    And if you think this is not in line with the other 38 games fine but we could not do all 30 other games of QPR or the other teams. The only way to do this is more referees join us for next season.

59. WOW literally unbelievable, this cannot be judged on 8 games…. QPR 1-2 Norwich (J Barton sent off wrongfully at 1-0 QPR) QPR 1-1 West Brom (SWP disallowed goal at 1-0 QPR) QPR 1-1 Villa (wrong penalty given at 0-0) QPR 1-2 Bolton (goal dissallowed at 1-1) QPR 0-2 Man U (Wrong penalty & red card at 0-0) Yes there were a couple of games where QPR got the rub of the green (Stoke away & Chelsea at home) but they were by far the unluckiest team in the prem. I am FC Porto fan but have season ticket for local team QPR

60. Like I said before, watching tv replays from the comfort of your own chair does nothing to give any credence to the colourful charts. Every experiment has to have control and here there is none. For someone to question the relationship between QPR and the sponsor, there must instantly be suspicion, therefore the results would be tainted anyway. Yes, I’m a QPR fan, but I’m realistic. We were shite for the large part of last season. But then I’m biased….

61. Josh sums the situation up very well. 20% is not a realistic sample.
    In particular the SWF disallowed goal was ridiculous, to the point where no one in the crowd knew why it was disallowed until they watched Match of the Day that evening. SWF was 2 mts on-side.

    Then there was the infamous Ashley Young dive at Man U. Got Derry a straight red and lost QPR the game.

    QPR suffered from a long list of crippling referee decisions, several of which made the newspapers, which on their own put QPR into that relegation fight.

62. For those who call us biased I would like to link you to a source that has no links with us and who have done things in a different way. They are not Arsenal supporters so please forget that we have anything against you.
    If you would have followed us through the whole year you would have been able to see each review of each game we did. Do you guys realise that when Tottenham Hotspurs was cheated by the refs at Stoke and we reviewed that game we called it like it was and said that the ref had stolen points from them. Now if we really would have been biased we wouldn’t have said that.

    But anyway just take a look at this http://www.debatabledecisions.com/tables

    Call us biased if you want but look at the position you are in, in their table when it comes to benefiting from wrong decisions and say that they are also sore biased Arsenal supporters. They are not

63. Walter – I agree with what you’re saying, but what you’re saying makes the headline and the comment about the sponsorship ridiculous. You admit the survey is flawed and yet describe it as “the unacceptable face of football”, inviting people to “read with horror” and then go onto allege some big corruption over a sponsorship deal. That’s completely irresponsible IMO.

    I’m a qualified referee for my sins as well since you asked.

64. Mark, maybe us asking questions about the sponsor was based on the outcome of the reviewed games?

65. Northern, if you would like to join us for next season please let me know. I can get you email address and could contact you but only if you really wish to do yourself.

    A review takes a few hours of time so not an easy thing to do

    But before you say yes please read this carefully http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/ref-review-2012 and try to make up your mind.

    We have been asking referees to join us since the start of last season. And we would love to have referees who don’t support Arsenal on board.

    But don’t commit yourself to the cause before you entirely see what we have done and how we have done it.

66. So basically all QPR fans agree with us in fact: the PGMOL and the refs have been shit 😉

67. By the way we have done more than 40% of all the games in the PL last season. 155 games in total.
    If you would have read more than this article you would have noticed that we have talked about global numbers in previous articles. If you think 40% is not enough… well that is what they said when we only could do 10% of the games. We have gone from 10% games done to 40% games done.

    Join us to make it 100% done next season!

68. Reviewed from the comfort of your own armchair. There are too many imponderables for there to be any value. For example why would we believe your panel over the actual referee? Down to opinion, right? You can’t apply the letter of the law when not directly involved in the game. I am totally psyched that our manipulation of referees saw us hit the heady heights of 4th from bottom. The only occasion I can even remotely think we had referee advantage was when Samba Diakite ran around kicking people for 30 minutes on his debut before being red carded for what was really his 7th or 8th red card tackle in the game.

    My concern with what you are doing is that you are arriving at an opinion using a wildly inaccurate method. Do I know of a better method? No. But then I’m happy loving my club whatever the score.

69. I’m gonna stick my neck out here and ask the QPR fans if this is the first time they have been made aware of this site?? I presume yes as you all seem to have no idea about the background behind this study (which is in it’s second season).

    We are well aware that there are flaws, the main one being not being able to review ALL the games but that is purely due to a lack of resources. We can only conclude from our findings and what you see above is what we found.

    Now I know it’s a bit long winded and you might be thinking I can’t be bothered as I’m not interested in Arsenal but it would serve you well yo have a look at the links to past reviews. There is also a link on the right hand panel for Untold referees where you can find every published report. You will notice that most of the games reviewed are not Arsenal games.

    Now, we would like to review more games, all of them in fact and we welcome fans of other teams to join. If you are a ref, please get in touch with Walter who would love to have you on board no matter how much or little time you could devote.

    As for Mark, what do you feed that kid of yours, you should be careful, you don’t want your kid growing up to be obese.

70. refs have cost us (qpr)at least 10 points so if anything refs have been anti qpr.so shut up as you dont know nothing

71. no team has has had as many criminal decisions against them as qpr. we stayed up in spite of referees not because of them.

72. if you want to find out who gets most decisions from refs check more on man utd, and chelsea.

73. The sample used is laughably small which makes the whole analysis and article a waste of time. Next time review all of the matches for a team before you publish any conclusions.

74. Rereading my own comment about Stoke – Tottenham Hotspurs it doesn’t sound really clear so I rephrase:
    Stoke-Tottenham: Tottenham was cheated on the field
    Stoke – Tottenham – untold ref review stated: Tottenham was cheated on the field.

    That is what our “biased” ref reviewers said about our biggest rivals.

    We really weren’t that interested to find a bias against QPR you know…

75. Oh Richard, fine want someone who reviewed all the games then. Why don’t you follow the link to http://www.debatabledecisions.com/tables ?

76. Lol. I have no issue with reviewing the games, merely with the quality. You cannot expect to get a valid set of figures without actively being involved in the game when it takes place. Referee the games as they happen and perhaps you’ll feel the pain the real ref feels and perhaps your figures may show much greater accuracy.

77. And for those who don’t wan to follow that link I can say that our conclusions are roughly the same. Sorry about that my QPR friends but either we are biased (fair enough if you think that, after all we are Arsenal supporters so can’t be right you seem to think) but then the debatable decisions are also biased (more difficult as they are no Arsenal supportes).

    Now of course it could be that well….some of you are maybe also just a very very tiny bit biased in your views….
    Or is that last option unthinkable?

    I know a few incidents that you don’t mention in your “reports” that went in your favour. Okay fine, fair enough but then don’t pretend that you are unbiased. Otherwise you would have mentioned them. We mention both in your favour and against you.

78. Guys, the number of games reviewed is not the flaw. The flaw is how the games are reviewed. You want accuracy, referee the games as they happen. You still won’t be doing so under the same conditions as the real ref, so you’re never going to come up with anything other than opinion as opposed to something based on the letter of the law. An example is the Clint Hill “goal” v Bolton. The ref can’t give what he didn’t see. No goal. End of story. Your reviewer would call this the wrong decision and as much as that may be true, it’s not as a result of anyone cheating or being a shit ref. they’re human.

79. Mark, and how do you think refs are getting reviewed by the football authorities?

    This whole system is just based on the way referees are reviewed in my country in the highest division: They are being reviewed based on video reviews of the games.

    And we are very ref friendly you know. In my country a ref can get max of 10 points. Not giving a red card when it should have been given cost a ref 3 points and thus he could only get a maximum score of 7 points.

    and at the end of a season each ref in the top division must have a score of at least 7/10 on average. If not he goes down to the second division and loses his financial status with it.

    So are you saying that they are doing a wrong job?

80. The decision league table thing is hugely flawed also. To what extent do they investigate decisions?

    Out of interest, which eight games did you use?

81. Yes. Thats exactly what I’m saying. If a job is worth doing, do it properly. makes no difference if you or an FA panel run the review, the important element of doing it live is missing. Football authorities use this method, so,why don’t you do something different and look for ways of getting improved data?

82. I struggle to see how a sample of our (yep another R) games can manage to miss the countless games where we were disadvantaged by poor referees and officials. Northernr has rattled off the obvious suspects with ease & I’m sure we could argue the direction of the bias in a number of other games if pushed.

    as with all clubs there were a few that went in our favour and the 2 mentioned earlier were good examples, it is also fair that these would balance out with a few going against us over the course of a season. I think this is the only place that has managed to imply any overall bias in our favour and it’s fair to say that all QPR fans would find these results and the link to the owners/sponsors laughable.

    I’m not a qualified ref; meremy a long suffering fan!

83. Mark,
    it doesn’t matter if refs are human or not. I’m a ref, I’m human so I make mistakes.
    But making mistakes should well as they say…even out. We are also just looking to see if it evens out. Go and have a read about the whole system link is on the page and in the comments and then we can see if things even out.

    And Mark do you want that football is fair when it comes to ref decisions? So why don’t you support to make it fairer for all? I can accept any defeat as long as it was fair and within the rules.
    Do you know one of the highest scores a ref got in our reviews was of that day that most Arsenal fans don’t want to hear about anymore. Yep that day in August last year. Somewhere in Manchester….

    It is those same ref reviewers who could praise a ref after that game who done the other games also. But if you really want to go ahead and call us biased… be my guest. Then there is nothing that I can say that could change your mind.

84. What are you talking about? I have never read such absolute bollocks in all my life

85. Mark any suggestions? I could be running next to the ref but I don’t think the FA and the PGMOL will let me on the field 😉

86. Mark,

    That is part of the reason for this whole campaign. If the refs are unable to keep up with the game then something needs to be done. You can’t justify bias by saying something like ‘referee the games as they happen’. The whole beauty of this is that slow motion replays are available to see if decisions are called correctly or not.

    It is also worth pointing out that in cases where a decision can not be properly reviewed, the ref is always given the benefit of doubt.

    Why would you not want the refs to be able to get all the decisions correct?

87. Josh, yeah of course they are…

    so anything that goes against your club is flawed… Josh the explanation how they work is on their website. Just as the explanation how we work.

    But you do have to take the trouble to read it of course

    In fact one of the most important statements I made in this article is this:
    “I could be very short on this: THIS IS BAD!!!!!!! ”

    This is the part where I don’t mention anything at all about refs being biased in favour of one team. This is about the total score of all the refs in games in which QPR was involved.
    If you are happy with a ref not even getting 70% of their decisions correct..okay fine.
    Like I said in one of the opening articles: 70% should be considered 50% in a school exam. That is like throwing darts, that is like tossing with a coin and make your decisions to how it falls on the ground

88. A mistake is a mistake. You can’t even them out as they just happen. You want me to support you to make football fairer? How would that not be biased? As far as I am concerned, referees are fair. They make judgements in the heat of the moment and give us, as fans, something to discuss. I wish you well with your work, but until you offer something unique that will be me signing off. Have a great season guys, I really hope the Gunners finish in the top 3 while we finish outside the bottom 3 🙂

89. I wonder if DogFace and Walter Broeckx are sitting in a darkened room, with their head in their hands.
    You both had a ‘Mare and should take up tiddleywinks.

    Come and read a decent website.
    http://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/fb_mb.php

90. Sorry, couple of final pieces. Don’t use the word biased if you are looking to help as it gives the impression you think the refs are deliberately cheating. Secondly, I was suggesting you referee live games from your comfy armchair as it would at least give some credence to your work.

91. westberksr,
    no I just would ask you to look at this link http://www.debatabledecisions.com/tables

    they come almost to the same conclusion.

    A conclusion that the QPR fans don’t agree.

    Okay fine, let us see your reviews based on a minute by minute review of the games.
    And not on the of in that game a goal was wrongly disallowed. Okay fine that might be so but was that the only mistake in the whole game?

92. Walter,

    I have managed to count 7 games
    A : Man City
    A : Newcastle
    A : Man Utd
    H : Arsenal
    A : Spurs
    H : Man City
    A : Arsenal

93. Just imagine for one second that we would have done other games. And that those games would show the complete different picture. A picture that most QPR fans claim that the real thing is.

    Just imagine we would come up with a conclusion from those games that QPR has been robbed (and let us forget that non arsenal website http://www.debatabledecisions.com/tables for a moment)

    Just try to imagine that situation and then try to imagine how you would react?
    I think most of you would come and say: yeah, you are right, we have been robbed, thanks for pointing that out.

    Would you then say: 8 games are not enough? (Of course we agree 8 games is not enough) No you would say: this is how it has been going all season long.

    But could it be that maybe because in the games we did (and maybe this is down to a bad choice of games) the result is not what you like you just throw it all away?

    Now maybe if I would be you and come on this site for the first time I could understand this first reaction. But please do take a look around and see how we did our games.

    By the way in the ManC – QPR game our ref reviewer was of the opinion that Tevez should have walked also in the Barton incident.
    Because it was Tevez who attacked Barton first. yep, that biased ref reviewer… 😉

94. I read it and concluded it was shite. Not because it suggested something against my team, but because I’ve been at the vast majority of my team’s 41 matches (inc cups) this season and know it to be shite.

    Your numbers aren’t ‘mind blowing’ at all. If you reviewed twenty QPR games over the course of a few seasons refereed by Mike Dean and found him to be hugely biased then that would be, but two supposedly randomly selected games? He gave a ridiculous penalty against us in the FA cup against our local rivals- if he was so pro-QPR I doubt that would be possible.

    I don’t think refs are biased. Some are incompetent, some are too inexperienced and are championed by the FA too soon despite this and many have their careers in mind when in charge of the biggest teams, which we are not one of.

    I’m genuinely curious though as to which eight games you chose to use, and even why, if there was a reason.

95. Andy will tomorrow 😉 but in my part of the world it is bed time and I need to go to work tomorrow morning and this work is not reviewing refs.

    A warning to people who give a comment for the first time: be patient as we have to approve you first to avoid spam …

96. QPR fans, Just out of curiosity, could you give us your opinion where some reviews were inaccurate. Here are a couple:

    http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/16842

    http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/21819

    Would be interesting to have your thoughts

97. So Josh, how long can you live with that shit produced by the refs and the PGMOL?
    We have started looking in to it and found what we found. You with your view from the stand has seen it better than the camera.

    I admit that when coming home from the stadium and seeing the images I had to admit I was wrong and the ref was right. Of course you could be right all the time of course.

    We have missed a top ref in you I think 😉

98. And a final word before I really go to bed:
    When I travel to the football stadium it is a day time job for me. I leave home at 6 am and I am lucky when I get back home the same day. I live a bit far away so have to save my money to make it. I use the money from what I earn as a ref by the way. 😉
    And when I sit in the stadium and a ref makes a mistake I find nothing more sad than getting a text from my son (who is also a ref) who is watching the game at home and who tells me the ref was wrong within seconds of the incidents.
    And when this incident ruins the whole game it is a long way home for me.
    I just want to stop mistakes (all mistakes) and make that people who go home know that the final score was based on fair and correct decisions of the ref.
    If you don’t agree with this fine, maybe you live too close to the stadium and you don’t have to make it a pilgrimage kind of journey each time. But I know people who have stopped going because they are not willing to pay their money to get it being spoilt by a wrong ref decisions that could be corrected within 3 seconds after a first replay

    Jesus, must really go to bed now

99. I’m not saying that nothing went our way. At Villa away we should have had a penalty awarded against us for handball, Bosingwa’s red card at Loftus Road was very harsh, Stoke were denied a late pen from a challenge that was clumsy at best at the Britannia and many more. What I am saying is that your research is trying to find controversy when there is none, and lacks any credibility with the sample size or a justification for choosing the sample you did.

100. @Walter seems you have got your hands full with problem finders and no solution providers. Mark it seems is a stuck record. Plus most new commenters say exactly the same thing. Maybe we are seeing a trend as to the type of person who follows the Queens.

101. Josh,
     It is trying to evaluate bias, whether intended or not-intended. That is what was said before this campaign began and that is still true to this day.

     We just feel that the old saying to back the Premier League up as being fair ‘it all evens out over the season’ probably isn’t true and therefore things are not fair.

     All we want is for things to be fair.

102. Having read a previous analysis of the man u v QPR match where the refereeing decisions were reviewed, I saw this link and expected a decent read. Sadly I was mistaken, a poorly presented case based on limited data (admitted to) and conclusions based on nothing more than a gut feel of a conspiracy theory with pretty pictures and graphs as some sort of proof.

     Perhaps bad decisions even themselves out through the course of a season; as a QPR fan, I certainly saw some decisions go our way, but I saw many more go against and cost points which would have made the Stoke Bolton game irrelevant. Maybe Bolton had enjoyed some advantageous decisions leaving them in a position where a win was enough – btw, didn’t they draw with Stoke?

     Anyway, I firmly believe the quality of refereeing was poor last season but will not subscribe to conspiracy theories, unless you believe that the FA wanted to punish QPR for finishing Champions of the Premership and not having a good enough case to dock the clubs points. A very tongue in cheek comment I admit, but I could build a case based on limited data and pretty pictures too.

     Healthy fact-based debate rages at not606, particularly amongst QPR fans.

103. Excellent work exposing this disgrace. Dodgy refs- dodgy deals
     and dodgy press and media for allowing it to happen without a massive fuss.

104. As a Football fan first and a QPR fan second I saw some poor refereeing last year and some lucky and unlucky decisions. chris foy who reffed the chelsea game was poor as he should have sent off david luiz and also ashley cole at the final whistle. by taking 8 games i wonder which one’s??? best refereeing was howard webb against liverpool withno bookings. but unlucky decisions like the clint hill goal agains bolton nearly cost us badly. also ashley youngs dive for united and norwiches cynical targetting of barton. but balanced against that was poor decision making by qpr payers and management. hughes not substituting diakate on his debut and cisse’s two mad moments. referee’s are treated badly by players and need more respect as in rugby. also cheeting needs to be punished by tv juries. if we cleaned up the game the referees may perform better. they are rubbish because the people that run the game are not prepared to deal ith systematic cheating!!

105. You’re distracting attention away from the key issue here with all this talk of bias and attempts to prove that you’re not.

     Bias isn’t the issue here. The issue here is you have taken a process that you admit is flawed, and used it to come up with a highly controversial theory about referees favouring QPR because of a shirt sponsorship deal, trumped up with a Daily Star style headline and intro.

106. And as a final point, these referees that favour QPR so much actually sent off ten of their players last season – a Premier League record held jointly with the 2009/10 Sunderland team.

107. So your testing the theory that ‘it all equals itself out over a season’ by using an 8 game sample. Surely your testing the lesser known ‘it all equals out over 8 games’ saying that only Arsenal fans have heard of. I know you state that your aware that 8 games is not ideal and your on a recruitment drive but to publish your findings as fact when it’s incredibly flawed leaves you open to dispute.

     Now Im out of here before Walter Mitty comes back with his links.

     P.s Got to love my fellow QPR fans passion.

108. Northernr, Did those ten players deserve to be sent off?

109. It’s a good job Emirates have never sponsored referees isn’t it? Imagine the potential for controversy.

     …Oh, wait a minute….!

     http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/referees-body-seeks-lead-sponsor/3009746.article

     Why weren’t you all so vocal about this a couple of years ago?!

110. Perhaps Arsenal are reaping the wrath of the reputation that goes before them. Live by the dive you die by the dive.

111. Morale was down, even NW left us due to our games being repetitively been squandered by uncalled whistles. We should’ve have won many matches, but these so called fairplay referee chew QPR bit by bit like termites in midst of Middlesborough time shift… lolz whatever… 🙂

112. @Walter

     You have really stirred up the QPR fans with this article. It is quite normal for all fans to feel their team is hard done by wrt ref decisions. But if QPR fans feel hard done by they should organise their own ref watch on the same basis as that of UA; then they would be in a position to debate any points of contention with evidence rather than emotion.

     The UA ref reports have covered a vast number of matches over the last two seasons, having commenced because of grave concern about the way the PGMOL refs were performing – and not just in Arsenal matches. There is now a lot of evidence to show bias – and the individual club summaries are very enlightening – some of the criticism does not seem valid.

     The PGMOL accepting sponsorship from the owners of QPR is a strange one; surely this is a conflict of interest that the PGMOL would do well to avoid.

113. PGMOL and QPR being sponsored by the same company is conflict of interest. It should be changed to avoid the appearance of evil.

114. The Tune groups sponsorship of PGMOL occured before Mr Fernandez was interested in West Ham Utd, He is a Hammers fan. What is more interesting about him is the timing of his rise in the world of commercial aviation. Just after 911 when the bottom fell out of the industry, He came in with cheaper flights than the big boys???????
     It’s not QPR im looking at but Mr Fernandez. I’d fully expect him to drop QPR if he can get his hands on West Ham.

115. Well I reviewed Arsenals first 8 games of the season and my stats show that you shouldn’t have finished 3rd 😉 Your statistics are at beat laughable and should you have actually reviewed the games that involve the 3 supposedly favourable refs you would have mentioned that in all these games they gave match changing decisions against QPR before becoming favourable. Maybe what your stats should actually show is that the refs had made a major mistake in these game and then tried to atone for thier errors by giving QPR a couple of extra free kicks, throw ins and so on, which may I add means sweet FA when we’ve had a goal disallowed that went over the line or a penalty give against because the opposition player is a cheating scumbag. Bottom line your stats are flawed and I don’t need a team of refs to prove that your trying to create another typical arsenal conspiracy theory.

116. “Did those ten players deserve to be sent off?”

     Clint Hill- stupid lashing out, yes. Diakite- madman on debut, absolutely. Traore- stupid tackle while on a booking- bit harsh but yes. Barton at City- obviously. Cisse at Sunderland- without doubt.

     Derry at United- clearly not, one of the overall most ludicrous decisions of the season. Taarabt at home to Spurs- a second yellow for kicking the ball five yards after the whistle had been blown. By the letter of the law a yellow card but in reality, no. In fact, the referee only gave him the yellow when he thought he wasn’t on one already and then left himself with no choice. Incompetence really. Barton vs Norwich- inconclusive, but guessed by officials who didn’t see the incident. Cisse at home to Wolves- incredibly harsh, again, letter of the law says the ref should but more often than not it would have been a yellow.

     Four out of nine reds were highly debatable. Hardly the form of the referee’s favoured team.

117. Padstow,

     maybe because this blog didn’t have the ref reviews in those days?
     And wait a minute… wasn’t there some suggestions at the time.
     But not that much in fact after seeing the refs do their best to blow that off the table 😉

118. Was it the 2-1 defeat that got somebody to produce this rubbish.

     How about being cheated out of two perfeclty good goals against Bolton and WBA, or having players sent off in half of the games, all opposition were allowed to rip into our players, no punishment.

     You could even look at penalty desicions for brushing the oposition players shirts.
     Our players had to be half killed to get a penalty.

     We were cheated, cheated and cheated agian all season.

119. And wait till you get to see the figures of Stoke…. LOL… Oh wait they are next in our review…

120. In a way I can understand some QPR fans but the problem is mostly that they just don’t understand the total concept.
     They just see one article of the 200 we did on refs in which we say something they don’t like and they just come rushing in and base their idea on that one article.

     If they would have tried to use their head a bit and read the introduction and all that stuff that we link to they could have seen the whole picture.

     But now they feel their team is attacked and go in defensive/aggressive mode and kick at anything that moves (now isn’t that nicely linked with football) 😉

     And by neglecting this and just focussing on the 0.5% of the whole review where we ask a valid questions based on our numbers they completely miss the main point.

     The main point is that this is more an attack on the quality of some referees and on the quality of the PGMOL and their boss Mike Riley.

     But because we say a bad word about QPR they stick their head in the sand and rubbish it all saying we are biased. Forgetting that they are extremely biased themselves by the way. 😉

     But my dear QPR fans if you want to get robbed in the future (according to the lists some of you produced you were robbed in all the other games we didn’t review…) just go on and call this rubbish.

     Because dismissing this is saying: the refs are great, the PGMOL is even greater and Mike Riley is God.

     But then don’t make lists to “prove” you were robbed. You can’t have it both ways: or the refs are good and you don’t get robbed or the refs might be rubbish and yo do get robbed.

     Why don’t you look for referees and ask them to join us in the future?

121. Paul, we started this route we are walking on a moment that QPR was not even in the PL.

122. Calm down QPR fans, if you don’t feel enough work has been done here, why don’t you get off your backside and do something instead of taking a swipe.

     Yes only 8 of your games have been reviewed and this report is therefore based on the findings…. OF THOSE 8 GAMES so I’m sorry if you couldn’t be bothered to do all of them but hey, this is an Arsenal site so we did all of the Arsenal ones and as many of the rest as we could do.

     If any of you had bothered to read the background on this campaign, you would happen to have understood more of what is going on. Instead you are making yourselves sound as intellectual as our next team under examination.

123. @ Josh – 6:10am

     Exactly why we are looking at things. I’m sure the team are very sorry they didn’t have the resources to do all of the QPR games.

     Why don’t the QPR fans get some refs to do the remaining 30 games and come back to us?

124. oh shut up….your just bitter that we pissed all over you a loftus road, and if it wasn’t for your soon to be departed captain, we’d have drawn with you at the emirates, as per usual bitter arsenal fans trying to blame everyone else for their short comings and never looking in the mirror, just like their manager. best of luck in the europa league next season…..

125. Try to look further than just this one article (that you didn’t like) is all I am asking and try to understand the bigger picture.

     Like I have said before: our ref reviewers who are qualified referees themselves have praised referees when Arsenal lost games, our ref reviewers have blamed referees who took points away from our biggest rivals.

     In our introduction article (you should have read them) we asked that if you don’t like something you should come up with the same report minute by minute of those games like we did. In the open where you can agree or disagree with each decisions on the field on a minute by minute report. Those are the numbers we have worked with and if you don’t agree with a decision fine: let us talk about it, take the rulebook in our hands, the instructions to the referees and discuss it. We have done all our reviews in the open on the internet. You should have brought up your remarks in those days. But as you didn’t we could only assume you agreed with those numbers.

     And this article is based on all those reviews (not just your 8 games) and the difference between the league average and the averages we found in your game.

     For starters you could read this to even try to start to understand the whole thing:http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22113 and http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22113 and this also maybe http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22421

     Do you really think that we started this review of the PL with the idea: “yeah come on let us prove that QPR is getting some favours from the refs” Because that is what I read in some of the comments of QPR fans. And this is making me laugh. I think QPR was the least of our worries when we started this. 🙂

126. You could also consider it as an exit poll that they use on election day.
     They base their results on a very small number of people and then come up with the final result and most of the times they are rather correct in it. And that is not base on a 15% sample of the voters.
     But it indicates a trend.
     A trend not just found over here at Untold. But also at http://www.debatabledecisions.com/tables

127. Pete @ 8:00 = Dummy spat out

128. Morning all. Stuck record here 😀

     So, because I am happy to let refs run a game I’m blinkered and a stuck record. I have to agree that referees are not of the highest standard, but isn’t that worldwide? And if it is, does that not therefore mean that perhaps the shit we see is standard? We are asking way too much of individuals. If you want to help, push for a 5th official and give team captains 3 shouts at questioning decisions.

     Alongside my shout for you guys to provide better data by doing something the FA don’t already do, have I not offered alternatives to supporting our refs? Seems to me that you guys are the blinkered ones here, happy to regurgitate opinion as fact. At the end of the day, ref decision is final. I don’t particularly like it, but I certainly respect it.

     Had your figures shown bias against QPR, I would still be singing the same song. We were shit without any help from anyone.

129. Well, I’ve just read this, and I’m sorry but it appears to me that you could pick any 8 games to forge those figures and back up a claim. Until all 38 have been reviewed, this article is just a wind up. Bitter that we beat Arsenal 2-1?

     I’ve been ‘lucky’ enough to see nearly all QPR’s games last season, one way or another, and I can tell you this. QPR have most certainly NOT been awarded leniency by the refs, or have 7 more points than we should – if anything it’s the other way around!! All season I was saying how unlucky we were, and that includes referees.

     I can think of 2 games where we got ‘offside’ goals. One was vs Swansea, however we were already 1 or 2 nil up by that stage, and Mackie had to run back past the defence to pick up the ball before turning to take them on.

     The other was a marginal offside against Bolton – but we’d already been given the worst injustice as it was by Clint Hill’s excellent goal being disallowed when we were well on top. Thanks to that, heads dropped and Bolton got into the game, which we went on to lose anyway.

     Red cards against Hill, Barton (not Man City) and Derry were wrong. At least Lee Mason has been highlighted for his horror show here, with the unblemished glee he displayed trotting across the pitch to dismiss Derry after farting on Ashley Young, the subsequent penalty ruining our hopes of a chance.

     Aston Villa – Michael Oliver. Where is he in this ‘review’?? Absolutely dreadful refereeing so in favour of Villa, he literally almost won the game for them!!

     Norwich has been covered…West Brom, perfectly good goal disallowed. I could go on and on, but the point is I’m sick of all this rubbish – proclamations of ‘professional reviews’ etc, when this is just a half baked experiment based on a handful of games. With the ability to review video footage, it doesn’t take a qualified official to recognise our general misfortune over all last season, just someone with a bit of common sense.

     Not good enough, not by a long shot. 8 games out of 38?? Check our online forums, that would give you a more accurate ‘review’!

130. Mark
     Why do you make the assumption we wont be pushing for a 5th official and giving team captains or managers 3 challenges at decisions?

131. So I missed that section of your site?

132. Please ignore DebatableDecisions.com they don’t use qualified refs, only fan opinion vote from 4-6 fans, – and are liable to miss things (which they admit).

133. Mark,

     If you come back in a few weeks you will see that we bring on solutions to avoid the shit. We just don’t want to accept shit as the standard.

     But we first had to do the reviews, then look at what the numbers told us (not complete of course but hey, last year 10% this year 40% and who knows maybe next year… doing all games if possible if we can get more referees and more games available) and in some cases the numbers gave surprising results. QPR was one of those surprises. I can give away Stoke was an even bigger surprise 😉
     Maybe QPR was unlucky to have the same sponsor as the refs so that will always raise eyebrows when you see results like that.

     And when all the numbers are given. After the teams we dig in to the refs and see how they connect with some teams, that also will be fun I think.

     But when all is given what we had we will come up with our final conclusions and recommend how things could improve.

     Sitting on our backside would have been the easiest option for us and would have given us lots of spare time. As a ref myself I know that doing something will result in being criticised (and I don’t mind that people are critical at all – it keeps us sharp).

     But somebody at some stage had to shout: hey look the emperor has no cloths 😉 Lots of people feel the same (not QPR fans apparently 😉 ), but don’t have any data to back up what they feel. We try to provide some data (40% of the PL we have covered) before we would come up with conclusions on what we found.

     And then offer solutions. I think this is the way we have to work.

     Of course the data will get better the more games we can cover. We dream of expanding and making this bigger next season…

134. Walter you keep linking to that site, did you bother to read the top disclaimer. Here I will copy it too you.

     DISCLAIMER – Please be aware that we are not trying to pass the REAL table off as fact, we are more than aware of certain flawed aspects…

     They (like you) realise their analysis is flawed, they however do not seem to be publishing bold headlines and conspiracy theories. Alternatively they start by admitting their flawed analysis which makes the website more palatable.

     As for your website as a whole, it’s quite a simple concept so I’m not sure why you try to make it sound so incomprehensible to other fans unless your making a play for the most pompous person to ever grace the internet, in which case kudos to you. You seem to be the one struggling to understand the limitations of your own research. Firstly the sample is too small to extrapolate accurately and the type of data you collect is not really suitable for extrapolation. Secondly the ref’s make decisions are made in real time, so your armchair analysis can only determine if they were right or wrong but cannot show a bias. This is because of what Mark says ie obscured views and quick decisions can be made wrongly due to human error. Your idea of bias seems to assume that the refs see the correct decisions then make a conscious decision to not give it, which cannot be proven from your analysis. All your analysis can say is that referees aren’t great which is obvious to anyone (qualified or not) with at least one working eye.

135. So in short the only place where we can find ‘unbiased’ information on QPR is on the QPR websites…….

136. Guys

     what you appear to have not grasped is that we are more pissed off that you have chosen to sensationalise the ‘results’ of your limited research research.

     We all agree that the ref’s overall are poor and that the likes of Manyoo get penalties at home (no surprise there), but you have failed to address the fact that we are highlighting the cheap attempt to make a story from the fact that our owner/sponsor also sponsors the ref’s (something in place before he even showed an interest in our club).

     refs performances are subject to your own opinion of the game and will always differ, I can’t even agree with my Dad who is sat next to me; what remains is the cheap attempt to create a headline from a vague link to our owners. Analyse your numbers all you like but try and keep the gutter level journalism to yourselves; there are enough rags printed each day doing that already.

137. Ben

     (The ‘you’ in this comment don’t really point at you personal but more to QPR fans in general who came here)

     I keep linking to that side because “you” keep asking for unbiased evidence.
     Because “you” keep saying that only if you 38 games you can talk.

     They covered 38 games.
     They have flaws, we have flaws. Flaws that we have been discussing over here and will be discussing on here.

     I could say the biggest flaw of “the rest” is that they do nothing except slagging off people who don’t sit on their backside.

     And I don’t mind that people are critical but please make up your mind:
     first “you” say: you are biased because you are Arsenal supporters, show me someone else who is unbiased and who agrees with your findings.
     When I then point at someone unbiased who comes almost to the same conclusions “you” say: they have flaws.

     So anyone who disagrees with the QPR party line as is declared on the “unbiased QPR blogs” is useless, rubbish, tells bollocks, …

     I don’t know but that sounds a little bit narrow minded…

     Maybe the times and the minds are not ready in some places (that again sounds pompous maybe) but I think on Untold we have taken that step last summer (again pompous I know) to look further than just our own little corner.

     We even get Arsenal fans complaining (even last week) that we look too much beyond Arsenal and don’t concentrate enough on Arsenal.

138. westbreksr,

     I think our chief editor has been working as a journalist or something in that styel in his life… some bad habits we cannot get out of the man. But he is ok for the rest 😉

     Wait till you see his Stoke headline (whatever that may be )

139. I have to say that this is impressively misrepresentative. Not only the absolutely inadequate sample size for any quantitative analysis (you’d need to look at, say, at least 400 decisions by any one ref), but also conclusions were not only based on a more-than-heroic extrapolation, but plain unrelated to the findings.

     “Refs make lots of dodgy decisions” – OK

     “In 8 games considered, QPR were hard done by in a couple and came out well in others.” – OK.

     “Tune sponsorship of refs – a potential conflict which should be ended” – OK.

     But this rant says you need one iota of editorial judgement and integrity, not more ref reviewers. And yes, the use of EPL does mark you apart from anyone who’s ever actually been to a game.

140. Would I be correct in assuming your “qualified referees”,would be located towards the bottom of the refereeing pyramid?

141. One thing is that we have had people who support other teams before. We did a review of team A and in this review we stated team A got robbed by the ref.
     Then we had fans of team A on this site applauding us for our insight, our sharp eye, our great work.
     But when some weeks later we did the same team A and in that game they got lucky with a few ref decisions and we just reported them like we always did and those same people came back shouting: you useless c*nts, b*st*rds,… you know the nice words people use when their team is “attacked”. (in fact we attack the refs most of all but that difference is difficult to understand for some)

     But our ref reviewers just did the same thing in both games: having a look at the ref and his decisions. But when we agreed with the party line we got congratulations, when we didn’t agree with the party line we got mud.

     We saw it always as a good sign as it showed that we did our job in an unbiased way, telling it like it is.

     But the bias attributed to us by other fans in most cases entirely depended on what we found in the games of their team.

142. Statto,
     the use of the word EPL is because we also cover other things like the SPL. (see one of todays articles on Rangers who play in the Scottish Premier league or not any more in fact) So in order to make it clear that we talk about the English League we use this.
     If you want to pick on that detail be my guest.

     I don’t like to call the sponsor of the PL by their names because well they could be seen as some kind of crooks you know. So I don’t want to be associated with them that much or want to give them some publicity.

143. Everyone knows the standard of referreing is rubbish.

     If you wanted to prove that that isn’t an issues.

     If you wanted to show that in a smallish smaple of games that refereeing was below that of the normal rubbish then fine.

     However your article is libellous an opens you up to a lawsuit, from any one of QPR, Tune Group, and any of the referees mentioned whom you accuse of being bought!

     After all that’s what the article boils down to using is sensationalist and provocative language.

     Let me ask this question.

     Did this sort of analysis start before Emirates stopped sponsoring the referees shirts or after ? Hmm .. maybe we ought to look at the motives of your site.

144. Walter,

     I appriciate what you are trying to do here. I just think QPR fans felt quite hard done by, we had a number of key decisions go against us last year. These few decisions really cost us.

     The eight reviews that you made, im unsure what teams these were against? But possibly not in these matches where these key decisons were lost?

     Also take Shaun Derry’s sending off at united where Ashley Young dives from an offside position, within the first ten minutes of the game as I recall. Away at United, a player down, penalty scored a goal down. This surely carries more weight than QPR getting a player sent off at home to Totternham at the end of the game?

     What I am trying to note is that key desisions at different times change the game ie an incorrectly given goal against the run of play could be a game changer.

     I’m interested in this unfortunatly I dont get a chance to go to all QPR home and away games anymore as I can’t afford it.

     Apologies about spelling im at work and shouldn’t really be on here! Just want the football season to start again.

     I’m sure QPR will do better next season and it won’t be so close!

145. Statto,

     If you would have read more than just this article we have pointed at the fact that we think that for the refs we have done more than 10 games we could be very accurate in telling how they are. What there strong points are, what there weak points are.

     I think we have done 10 refs from whom we have done more than 400 decisions. So you will like those analyses I think. It could be more in fact but don’t have the numbers right now.

146. JC,

     so you agree that sponsoring the refs and a team could be a dangerous path to walk?

147. Robert,

     We are trying to add the games we reviewed in the next articles. You see, nobody is perfect and we have done it before but for some reason it escaped us in this article. If I can find the time between answering some comments will still add it.

     We did the MU-QPR game and it is visible in the last graphic above number 32. The big negative bias line. use ctrl+ to make it larger if it is too small

148. Re ‘EPL’ I’ll leave that to readers to judge; but people in a position to evaluate your thesis know where QPR play, for me you’re just peddling rubbish to the ignorant.

     Back to the main point: Do you really think that more of these cack statistics and more of this cack editing will make refs better?

149. Walter.

     Absolutely. But more to remove the question/perception of conflict of interest as opposed to actual which I do not believe is present, much like I didn’t believe it was present when Emirates sponsored their shirts.
     And I believe Tune group will be stepping down at the end of the sponsorship deal for this very reason.

     However it does not justify libelling, QPR, a billion dollar company, and the refeees named.

     The article reads like a witch hunt and not like a properly researched piece of work. That is the biggest problem I, like many others have with it.

150. I don’t think anybody actually minds that the sample size is small but they mind that the sample has given such a woefully inaccurate picture of a season in which we’ve toiled and scraped our way to the dizzy height of 17th but has then been purported as being more significant than it really is.

151. Keep up the good work! @Untold Team and the regular posters

     I wonder if some of the posters calling this website’s investigations a conspiracy theory do not have a vested interest in the matter…

152. Statto,

     It has more of a chance in doing something than your actions (nothing)

153. I love the title of this report
     http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/airline-business/2012/05/airasia-premier-dishes-out-the.html

154. I’d start with a reasoned response to the evidence. that’s just me.

155. Why is it that are old ‘friend’ Mike Dean crops up yet again eh!
     @ Robert at 11:31 – Also take Shaun Derry’s sending off at united where Ashley Young dives from an offside position, within the first ten minutes of the game as I recall. Away at United, a player down, penalty scored a goal down. This surely carries more weight than QPR getting a player sent off at home to Totternham at the end of the game? – this is a good point. Is this a flaw with the ref reviews ? How often do players get sent off early at Old Trafford (normally very harshly as well) and yet when a Manu player gets sent off isn’t it normally a lot later in the game. The incorrect decision would carry a lot more weight earlier in the game.

156. Have you even started gathering your evidence? I very much doubt it. As I said, you are doing nothing!

157. Micko & Robert,

     A factor that has been discussed on here about how refs seem to do things during the course of a game in order to say they evened things out.

158. What a load of utter nonsense. This whole thing is made up of stats I bet you can not back up. QPR were subjected to a huge number of vital decisions that went against QPR last season. Disallowed goals, unwarranted red cards, blatant incorrect offside decisions. Sounds like a bunch of aggrieved Man U and Arsenal supporters to me with far too much time on their hands. Jog on!

159. Alfie if you would care to look at the actual ref reviews themselves you will see otherwise. But still, we’ve had enough of this, and yours is the last such post. See the current post for why.

160. QPR FANS

     You suggest the eight games reviewed are an unrepresentative sample (I’d agree with this because the team that came up was better than Swansea/Norwich – there is no way they should have outperformed you in the top flight) but you have even less data than we do. You are the guy who brought a gun with no bullets to a knife fight.

     As an aside, if you can persuade a QPR supporting ref to watch that other team in Fulham a few times, we’d love to have a control sample for referee bias. They might enjoy watching AR53NAL – CHEL53A again though.

161. Stuart
     July 16, 2012 at 1:38 pm
     Have you even started gathering your evidence? I very much doubt it. As I said, you are doing nothing!

     So your saying that doing something poorly is better than doing nothing? Like I said before all your evidence shows is refs are poor, we all know that we don’t need evidence. You do however need evidence to support you claims of bias which you do not have nor have you started to collect evidence of any bias. How would you even go towards proving that incompetence is biased, they are mistakes and the honesty of them is purely speculative.

     To be honest, and I hope my fellow QPR fans agree, we were used to poor referees in the Championship and hoped for an improvement in the top flight but if anything it got worse. More incorrect decisions one way or another but they went both ways and two sets of flawed analysis proves the same as a million sets of flawed analysis …. nothing because it’s flawed, inaccurate or erroneous if you prefer, take your pick. You’d be better off looking for brown envelopes.

162. Ben,
     we could have left the little teams out of this. But we also felt that we had to give them what we had. And if that is the result of what we had, we had to give it to whoever is reading.
     We have judged over 7.000 decisions in the 154 games we did. Judged as a ref with the laws of the game in hand.

     If others have done the same we should and would swap our numbers with pleasure to see if something is wrong.
     And yes in those 7.000 decisions some things might be wrong.

     But the whole year we have asked people to point us at what is wrong. Some 11 months anyone could argue each and every line or decision. Some have and in some case we have admitted a mistake or when our ref reviewers put a 0 where a 1 should have been put or the other war round.

     But after putting 7.000 decisions together and nobody complaining any more the only thing we could do is analyse the numbers that at that moment nobody disputed any more.

     And when we saw what we saw suddenly hell broke lose and we get mud thrown at our heads because the final outcome doesn’t suit you or your team… then it is a bit late I think.

     You could have come earlier and said: well in that game X – Y in minute 7 you say that player x scored a valid goal. But it should have been a goal disallowed because you cannot attack a keeper when he is in the air of the 6 yard box attempting to catch a cross as this is against the laws of the games and the instructions as is written on page 45 of the Fifa instructions. And then we will check that and if you are right we will correct this.

     But it should have been done at the time when the reviews came on line. Now it is a bit too late and now just wipe it off the table is a bit too easy.

     I want things to change in the referee world. Not because I like change for the change. But because after 2 years of reviewing games I can tell you: we need a change. And I actually don’t give a toss if it would have cost my team 5 points or would won my team 3 points.

     In fact, I want to stop reviewing referees and go back to enjoying the football. But as long as there is no change…I will carry on reviewing and try to find more people to join this battle to reform the referees in football and to make it fair for all.

     A (r)evolution has to start somewhere… 😉

163. I am a regular follower of RefReview series and Guyz this is an awesome job.

     One suggestion Tony, If you could give links to the pages of each match that was reviewed, it would be really helpful. For instance, if you could group all those refreview pages of QPR under one page and give that link here(which summarizes overall performance), it would be easy for the guyz to understand.

     I believe this will end all those quarrels of “Where is your data to support this?”.

164. To add to my point, I could see 4 matches listed under this article but two without any links. It would be easy If I could see links for 8 QPR matches that were reviewed in one page.

165. Pad Gooner,

     we will try to add that information in the future.
     But it is something we have to look up and add manually to the article and I admit to sometimes forget it.

     But if people type the name of the team at the top of the page in the red where it says ‘search here’ and then press enter they should get the reviews and the articles related to the games of said team.

     But will try to add them in the future

166. I am a QPR fan, and I laughed at this. You must have reviewed some of our rare good decision matches. We had about 10 or so crap decisions against us last season, including SWP’s disallowed goal vs West Brom, Clint Hill’s disallowed header vs Bolton, Shaun Derry’s sending off while United won a penalty, Taarabt’s sending off vs Spurs….and in some matches the ref’s were blatantly giving decisions against us on purpose. Decisions against us last season was just unacceptable, we were getting them almost every game! The one’s you must have reviewed, again I’d say were our rare games where good decisions were made

167. Sure Walter. I thought for new comers it would be easy to locate relevant pages before starting mudslinging.

168. Walter,

     I had noticed that Man Utd was mentioned. No need to change the type size. Im a QPR fan and was trying to be constructive but understand its hard when your getting alot of flak on here.

     I admit I dont fully understand everything here as I haven’t had a chance to read the explanations fully but was simply making the point that decisions at different points in a game of football make huge differences on the Outcome.

     For example a Team on top for the first 40 mins without scoring in a game only to conceed before half time and go on to lose 1-0, when this goal shouldnt have been allowed these decisions cost the match where as the same decision when your 3-0 up doesn’t have a lasting impact.

     That decision at Man Utd for QPR being the singly handedly worst decision I could think to dream up. And as conspiricy theories go I never wanted to believe Man Utd get all the decisions but now I’m not sure.

     I hope that your website can continue to do this as its important work but hopefully with a bigger sample of games, or even two people doing each sampled game. (Again im not sure exactly how you work).

169. http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22066

     @Robert, First a disclaimer, I am a visitor much like you and I am not a referee reviewer.

     There is an explanation given in that link on how refs are scored. First two paragraph more or less tell us about how decisions are weighed.

     For critical decisions like goals, penalties and red cards, refs would get 3 points for correct decisions and 0 points for wrong decisions.

     So lets take your example.

     In the first case, lets for this explanation sake assume that there was only one important decision which is that goal which should not have been allowed. So the ref would get 0 points out of possible 3. Which would give ref a pathetic 0% correct result.

     In your second case, the ref gave 3 correct goals and one incorrect goal. So he would get 9 out of possible 12 points. So he would get 75% correct result.

     So even by these numbers we can tell that Ref1 is pathetic and ref2 is ok.

     If you want to know how a full match is reviewed, you can take a look at this link(MANC vs QPR)
     http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/21819

170. @Nick – yes, we do need more matches – I put in a memo about this in the very first data-article of this series specific to the QPR data here:

     http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22277

     To quote: “Also it should be noted that teams such as QPR have only had 8 matches reviewed and, in their case, 2 of these matches involved a couple of real stinkers (or outliers) from Mike Dean Vs Arsenal – so their position in this table is perhaps not representative of their entire season.”

     Regular readers and followers of this series would no doubt have taken that on board.

     The significance of course will be calculated at the end of this series – I think one poster asked about that and they are correct, there may be little statistical significance given the sample size.

     We would love to review more games so if you have access to full match videos then get in contact and/or you know some qualified referees who are willing to give some time it would be very much appreciated!

171. Also – other posters – quite frankly asking us to swallow the theory that brave little QPR battled against all odds to avoid relegation because: “that’s what we reckon” is well… tell you what – we’ll give you a few more seasons of shite refereeing and you will realise that you will finish in the EPL table pretty much exactly where you are told to finish – nothing more, nothing less.

     If they wanted you down you would have gone down.

172. Could anyone tell me which games were in the sample? Sorry as I’ve asked before and may have received a response but I can’t seem to find it. Cheers.

173. Please can you post a link to the system you use? Also explaining the Low Medium and High rating.

     Next season id like to do this while watching a stream of QPR games to see if you are right. My gut is telling me we did get some incorrect decisions for us, but we had some major major decisions against us game changing ones. I can count at least 9 more points we should have got last season.

     When reviewing 6 or 8 games for a team it’s not a fair to then compare with others where you have a fairer representation.

     Also we lost five of the six games you’ve listed (I don’t know what the other two were), so how has this helped us? No advantage has been gained overall here.

174. I think ther review of the small number of QPR games highlights the problem of refereeing bias in the Premier League.

     The small number of games reviewed shows that, depending on who is playing, there is a massive swing from one game to the next.

     It seems to me that QPR is the best example of one team being a pawn in the game depending on who they are playing and who the referee is.

     QPR fans shouldn’t be moaning about this analysis but asking “what the hell happened in those 8 games?”

175. Ben, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. If you want any further response from me go back and look at the game reviews (all 8 of them) and come back to me with your assessment, I’m not wasting any further time with you pointless moaning, because that’s all it is. You don’t understand what has been done because you are only looking at the end result and are ignorant of the hard work that has been done here.

176. um…

     the question of whether tune group’s sponsorship of referees (given the owners’ connections to qpr’s owners) is, of course, valid. but… before looking at that one, there’s a starter question – is an analysis of referees’ performance over a combination of two games against arsenal and an incomplete review of televised games (6 from 12 here) sound if it has been done by arsenal fans?

     this article claims high bias against arsenal in both home and away matches against (although it barely registers on a qpr fan’s list of contentious refereeing decisions from 2011/12). the other articles (and the couple of other arsenal ref reviews on this site that i managed to find – it’s a difficult website for a stranger to navigate!) also seem to show that arsenal are usually viewed as being on unfairly treated by referees – interested to see how mind-boggling the numbers in a review of the arsenal matches would turn out to be.

     of course, redo this analysis of the qpr games without the arsenal games and what does it show? nothing mind-boggling at all… a slight, although probably not statistically valid, bias against qpr.

177. Hi Everyone,

     Just a quick update for you, we have some exposure on a QPR blog now, hopefully this will bring more refs and more importantly, some non Arsenal refs.

     http://qprreport.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=32599