By Walter Broeckx
This article is part of the series of the Referee Review 2013. You can find links to earlier articles on the bottom of this article.
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In this part of the series we have a look at each team and see how the bias panned out for each team. This is based on the decisions themselves without putting any weight on each decision. A total table will be published at the end of this series and then you can compare each team with the other teams.
And it will be an interesting table I can assure you of that.
First we are providing a table for each team highlighting each type of decision. This gives the totals as for when the team in the article got a favourable decision and when they got it against them.
If the traditional mantra, “it all evens out at the end of the season” is true it should show in these statistics – and indeed for some clubs we have already reviewed, that is the case.
But as I said, in the table we just show the decisions as a decision and we didn’t put any weight on the decisions. That is something for later on. Now we just take each decision at the same value, which is of course not saying all because a wrong penalty call is a bit more important than a wrong throw in decision.
But now let us move to the sixth team in our survey: Queens Park Rangers.
The bad thing about QPR is that we only did 15 of their games and that is just under 40% of their games. The numbers should show it to a certain degree but as you can imagine it doesn’t paint the full picture for this team.
In the second column we see the type of decision. And in the column “favoured” we see how many decisions favoured this team when we reviewed them. And in the column “Penalised” we see how many times a wrong decision went against them. The total swing is the difference between the favoured decisions and the penalised decisions.
A negative number in this column means that the total was against the team and a positive number means that the total decisions was in their favour.
In the last column we see the average swing per game based on the games we reviewed. And this gives an indication on how many decisions went against a team or were in favour of a team. The lower the number the lower number of decisions that were wrong. And a positive number indicates that in each game they get some decisions in their favour and a negative indicates how many decisions the team has to overcome.
We had a total of 232 wrong decisions in the 15 games we did with QPR. That is more than 15 wrong decisions per game, almost 16. This is again one of the most disgraceful number I have ever seen. 15-16 wrong decisions on average each game. Terrible. Completely unacceptable. Just as it was with Reading and is it any coincidence both teams went down? For Wigan this was only 10 wrong decisions so they are the exception to the rule maybe. But looking at this it looks that the worse level of refereeing you get, the more chance of going down? Something to think about.
Of those 232 wrong decisions we had 125 in their favour and 107 going against them. The difference is 18 decisions going against QPR. So that is a bit of good news one could say, if you look at it from a QPR point of view. The level of the refereeing was terrible in general but QPR got the better of it. It means that we had just over 1 decision going in their favour on average per game.
If we first look at the decisions that went in their favour we see that this was for foul/free kicks in a very big way. And if we look at the more important decisions we see that they went in their favour a lot. 2nd yellow cards and yellow cards was going their way.
But they also got some big things going against them. The wrong awarded goals but that was only about one goal. And the red cards was also something that very much went against them.
But all in all a rather dark set of numbers. Way too many wrong decisions but looking at a QPR point of view most of the wrong calls went their way. And that is the same is happened last season.
Recent posts
- How Arsenal’s failure to act has caused the club problems
- A perfect example of a game played under two different sets of rules
- Four things that might happen at the end of the season in the Premire League
- Football Transfer Economics
- Consolation in defeat: or how to keep calm when all seems lost
- The books…
- Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
- Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
- The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal FC: crowd behaviour at the early matches
The sites from the same team…
- Referee Decisions – just what are the refs up to this season?
- The Arsenal History Blog from the AISA Arsenal History Society
How/who decides a decision is wrong?
Are they qualified referees?
With 232 wrong decisions in 15 games, another arrow wounding the ability of humans to fairly control professional football matches.
The day will inevitably come when mechanical means will decide all but the simplest of tasks, leading to the long awaited demise of the PGMOL.
Thanks again Walter- excellent work by all involved.
As a person born in Yorkshire (learned to walk in Stuart Ave, Hendon), schooled in Yorkshire and destined for Man City until glass totaled my anterior cruciate, I am able to say with more pertinence than most- how appalling it is for virtually all the top refs to be northerners. It beggars belief that there are not plenty of quality home county refs for example. For goodness sake- there must be hundreds of refs better than Andrew Taylor. What is happening? English Prem refs, as a group, must be among the worst in Europe surely.
Bearing in mind that some of these QPR refs were above average for the group- some must have been unacceptably bad. And it is chastening to know that despite being helped- QPR still went down!
It wasn’t always like this. When my cousin (an Arsenal legend) and I played the refs were fairly spread region to region and, although some were disliked more than others by supporters and players alike, there were zero cases of persistent bias such as we have today. In my opinion, give the old refs the same video analysis as you have just done Walter and you will find the margins will be much closer, collectively and individually, with no discernable patterns of repeatable bias. More than anything- this is why I am convinced supporters of all but a couple of clubs are being stitched up. Years ago the current situation would not have been allowed by the Press or TV. This is what happens when hedge funds get involved in club ownership. Integrity (or true sportsmanship) is the first, second and third casualty.
Yes, everyone who writes a ref review is indeed a qualified ref. If you take a look at http://www.refereedecisions.co.uk there is quite a bit of background there.