Ref review 2012/13: Mark Clattenburg – good on red poor on yellow

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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For the next ref in our series we have ref Mark Clattenburg.  Ref Clattenburg has been in the PL since 2004 and is a FIFA ref since 2006 and he is still only 38 years old.  So we will be seeing him around for a few more years.

He is a well respected ref most of the time and maybe I can remind you of the fact that he was the ref of the season 2011-2012 based on the numbers from our referee reviews of that season.

In the season just behind us ref Mason did 21 games in the PL and we reviewed 12 of his games. That is 57.14% of his games we have been able to cover. So high enough to draw some conclusions on this ref.  So how did he do when we look at all the decisions? And could he be again the ref of the season this time? Let us try to find out.

In the 12 games we reviewed we have seen that Clattenburg had to make 1910 decisions in total. And according to our referee panel he had 1661 correct decisions. That is 86.96% correct decisions.  I can tell you and those who have followed us know that this isn’t the best score of the refs so far. We have seen worse but also better.

Of course by now you know that judging them as correct is not the same as being correct completely. When we can’t judge a call or when we are not 100% sure he made a mistake we call the decision correct. But it might be that if we had seen other angles we might have seen an incorrect decision.  So in general the numbers could be even flattering the refs but this goes for all the refs and not the refs we are looking at today.

Let us have a look  at his important decisions.

He had to make 887 important decisions and he had 673 of them marked as correct and this is a score of 75,87%.  This is almost the same as last year but as thanks to the new system most refs had a better score it shows that he didn’t have the best year in his career.

But still some great numbers there. The red cards decisions was spot on. But his yellow cards decisions were not really that good and certainly his second yellow cards were bad.

If we look at the foul/free kick decisions we see that his numbers are just below 80%. I think Clattenburg should have a score of at least 80%. So even though this is not bad compared to other buts I think for Clattenburg the bar is raised a bit higher (being the ref of the season 2011/2012 brings some expectancy) and so it us below par.

But what is great is that his score of penalties are better than his general foul score. He had 80% of his penalty decisions correct so that is a great number.

The goal decisions are a bit mixed. Around 90% correct is not what I want to see. Many other ref gets the same score but I think the goal decisions should have a score closer to 100% than to 90%.

I remember from the season before the last that one of the strong points of Clattenburg was low bias scores for the teams involved in general. Could he repeat that trick last season? Let us take a look at the bias numbers.

If we look at the 14 teams involved in the games with Clattenburg we see that if we are generous we could say that 8 of them get a low bias score.  I refer to Norwich, Chelsea, West Ham United, QPR, Tottenham, Stoke,  Manchester City and Manchester United.  But we do have a few teams with a big bias in favour. Aston Villa, Fulham were two of them. And if you look at Swansea…they sure had some big things going their way it seems.

On the other hand we see that two teams were treated rather badly when he made mistakes. Southampton and Arsenal were those teams.  Some very uncharacteristic numbers if we look back at the seasons before for Clattenburg.

FINAL CONCLUSION:

So it looks that he didn’t have a really great season. Some will remember the outburst after the Chelsea-Manchester United game when he was accused of all kinds of things. I do have the impression that he suffered from this also later on when he came back after a short rest.

I noticed a slight hesitancy at times that I didn’t noticed before. A ref with doubt in his mind because of the allegations? It somehow showed in his numbers I think. And a ref with doubt is usually a bad ref.

A ref that has proven he can do better so it is all more disappointing to see such a score from him.

• 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: you should blame the refs
• 20: Fulham – it all evens out in the end
• 21: Everton: a slight bias in favour
• 22: Chelsea: an occasional bias against
• 23: Aston Villa: a huge bias in favour
• 24: Refs give opposition freedom to kick Arsenal off the park.
• 25. The complete league bias table
• 26. Untold has said it for a long while, others follow
• 27. Andre Marriner; a good ref but 10% of his goal decisions are wrong!
• 28: Anthony Taylor: Disastrous when it comes to penalties
• 29.  Chris Foy: Very bad on cards and fouls
• 30.  Howard Webb, an amazing score
• 31: Jonathon Moss: Over 90% right.
• 32: Lee Mason, the ref with penalty area fever
• 33: Kevin Friend: the red card disaster
• 34: Lee Probert: This is not acceptable