Referee Review 2012/13: Fulham. It all evens out in the end.

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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n 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 next team in our survey:

Fulham

We did 17 games of Fulham and that is 44,74% of their games. So unless the complete contradiction from every other match happened in those 17 games we can think that this should be the pattern for the whole season.

 

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 174 wrong decisions in the 17 games we did with Fulham.  That is around 10 wrong decisions per game. Seeing the earlier results we have published this isn’t top of the table so this isn’t too bad.  But more importantly now is to see how the dividing was of those wrong decisions.

Of those 174 wrong decisions we had 85 in their favour and 89  going against them. The difference is 4 decisions going against Fulham in total. This is one of the more smaller biases against a team that we have seen.

When we look at the decisions we see that they got some benefit from the 2^nd yellow and yellow card decisions. Certainly the yellow card decisions are favourable. They also got a positive swing for goals and penalty decisions. Albeit with only one decision in their favour in total. But still better to have one than to have none. And then the smaller decisions like advantage and throw in.  And that is it for the advantage they got.

If we look at the decisions going against them we see that the foul/free kick decisions were a bit more against them. And the same can be said about the goal kicks and corner decisions.These type of decisions are very much the same of course but it looked as they got some wrongly awarded corners given against them. Now when the opposition doesn’t score from them it doesn’t matter but when they do it is a different matter.

So one could say that Fulham can be slightly satisfied with a small bias against them and more in the small decisions and be happy with the way some big decisions went in their favour.  That is of course what we found in the games we reviewed.

Editorial note: if you want to comment it is perhaps worth having a look at some of the background to this research in the articles below, if you have not come across Referee Decisions before.  We have had situations in which supporters of various teams have not done this, and made comments which, in retrospect they maybe wish they hadn’t.

• 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, penalties and some amusing comments
• 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
• 16.  Newcastle United – again, more errors than there should be.
• 17.  Manchester United: 70% of wrong decisions in their favour. 
• 18.  Manchester City: unlike their neighbours a very small bias.
• 19.  Liverpool.  Time to blame the refs