REFEREE REVIEW 2012: Chris Foy – footballing teams beware!

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This article is part of the series : REFEREE REVIEW 2012

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By DogFace and Walter Broeckx

Untold Arsenal has a team of qualified referees who have reviewed more than 40% of the EPL games from last season. The reviews themselves were based on full match video footage with the advantage of video technology features such as slow motion and pause.

By reviewing those 155 games we have made a database of more than 7000 decisions that have been judged by our panel of dedicated and qualified referees.

The numbers you will see are based on those decisions and those reviewed games.

Next in our review we find one of the older refs in the PL. Chris Foy is 50 years old so lots of experience but did he use it for the good?

Chris Foy

We did 8 games from Chris Foy last season. And that is just under 41% of his total games in the PL. We are getting close to doing 50% of a ref his games so that should be interesting to see how he did.

If you want more and you are a ref you can always drop in a note or a comment telling us you want to join our referee review team. We still could use some help for this season.

So with no further delay now let us look at his competency numbers.

So this is bad. A score below 70% is not good enough. His un-weighted score is only 68% correct decisions. Not good enough for a PL ref. Not good enough at all.

And if we put weight on the decisions we see that his score drops to 66%.

As has been said before you need a score of 70% in other countries to remain in the top league. If we look at Foy his numbers we don’t have someone that could stay in the top league.

Now let us find out where his flaws were.

The goal decisions are…shocking. Only 80% correct. that means that 2 goal decisions out of 10 are wrong with this ref on the field. Sorry but that is not something we can accept in my opinion.  This is terrible.

The offside decisions are almost like the league average. So I will not complain about that but just point at the number of 99% correct offside decisions that were claimed by Mike Riley earlier on this season.

The other decisions are also not good at all. A score of around 67% is not up to the required standard of refereeing in the PL.

The good news is that his average penalty decision is better than the league average. But then again 60% correct can and should be better.

His score on red cards is also a bit better than the league average.  But I will not start a party for a score of 28% correct decisions.

The yellow card decisions are nicely split up. 50% correct. Below the league average and not good enough.

Now let us see if we can detect any form of home and away bias.

Blimey… pity the poor team that has Foy away from home when he has his bad day. This is a terrible and out of order negative away bias against the away teams. The home teams of course have a terrible positive home bias.

And if we put weight on the decisions we see the same thing. A totally out of order negative away bias against the visiting teams.

With the games we reviewed and with these numbers the only conclusion we can reach is that this is a home biased referee.

Let us now see how the different teams did.

Well this ref is the perfect match for Stoke. Poor football skills matching poor foul spotting skills maybe? What a very favourable bias for Stoke.  Amazing.

He also seems to have a bit of  a soft spot for United in his referee’s hart.  I tend to see that the worse the football was from some teams (Norwich is an exception it seems) the more favours he gave those teams.

And he certainly has no soft spot in his heart for Chelsea who are the team that got most against them when he was in charge. Also Arsenal is on the bad end of things. As is Swansea, another more football playing team. And I even dare to add Tottenham to that.

And amazingly how between all those high numbers for and against, we find Sunderland with a zero bias score.

Like I said: the better you try to play the more he will blow against you and the more you kick the more he will let go. Does this remains the same when we put weight on the decisions?

Well the score from Chelsea is ridiculous. Completely unacceptable. And the rest of the footballing teams also suffer a lot under the weighted score from this ref. Arsenal, Swansea and Tottenham Hotspur are certainly not amongst his favourite teams.

We then have a few teams with a rather low negative bias like Manchester City and Newcastle. And again Sunderland shows to be the exception of the rule with a zero bias score. So he can be unbiased it seems.

But if we look at the team he favoured we see that those scores are totally out of order in their positive bias in favour of Bolton, Manchester United, Norwich,  QPR and Stoke.

FINAL CONCLUSION

So what did we see in the games we reviewed? A ref that has no real clue about what a foul is or not. And on top of that he is extremely biased for the home teams and extremely biased in favour of teams that try to kick and bit or bend the rules to their benefit.

Based on the games we reviewed we cannot call him a referee that is fit enough to be in the PL.  He looks to be an in-competent home ref with a bit bias in favour of Manchester United and some teams who try to play outside the rules.

I cannot find any reason to keep this ref in the PL. But then again the PGMOL decides on this and they seem perfectly comfortable with him.  But for those who follow the PGMOL a bit that might not be a real surprise.

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