Referee Review 2012/13: Newcastle Utd. 11 wrong decisions per game.

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:Newcastle

We did 17 games of Newcastle last season and that means that is around 44,74% of their games.  Not bad but could have been better of course. But still close to the 50% mark and we should be able to draw some conclusions from these games.

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.  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 199 wrong decisions in the 17 games we did with Newcastle.  That is more than 11 wrong decisions per game, almost 12. This is again rather high and certainly too high for my liking.  But we have seen worse things this season so after a while you get used to it.

Of those 199 wrong decisions we had 102 in their favour and 97 going against them. The difference is only 5 decisions in favour of Newcastle. And that is a rather low number. Because this means that Newcastle had almost no bias swing in their games we reviewed.  And that is the way we would like to see it for all teams if possible. But the series so far have shown that such a table as we have here is rather the exception and not the rule.

In fact all the differences are rather small in this table. The goals have evened out. The penalty decisions with only 3 wrong look fine and then you always have either and advantage or a disadvantage. The red cards is a small difference and evens out with the not given 2^nd yellow cards.

So all in all this looks like a table like they should look for all the teams. Even the difference in the foul/free kick decisions is rather small compared to most other teams.

Now I do realise that in some other games things might have gone wrong completely but in the games we did there was nothing to really complain about it when you count all the decisions in total. More of this please.

Earlier articles in the series of ref review for 2012/13

• 1. Who reviewed the games
• 2. What we did and what next
• 3. All the decisions in numbers
• 4. The first at times astonishing numbers
• 5. Home and away bias
• 6.  It all evens out in the end – Wigan last season
• 7.  West Ham: Life with a positive bias
• 8: West Brom and the Referees
• 9: Tottenham and the refs
• 10: Swansea City and a change this year
• 11: Sunderland, a positive bias
• 12: Stoke, where refereeing is different.
• 13: Southampton – how did they ever survive?
• 14: QPR – a strange case
• 15: Norwich – more errors than acceptable