Ref Reviews 2013: Mike Dean. An unacceptable bias.

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 Mike Dean..    Mike Dean  is 45 years old and is in fact now one of the longest serving  refs in the PL to my surprise. We have seen him around for 13 years in the PL. So he should be one of the most experienced refs around.  Dean has been a Fifa ref for many years also so by the PGMOL he is regarded as one of their top refs. Will we find this in the games we have reviewed?

In the season just gone ref Dean did 28 games in the PL and we reviewed 17 of his games. That is 60,71 % of his games we have been able to cover. So a rather high number and this makes it more easier to draw conclusions.  This is one of the higher percentages of all the refs we have. So this should be good to draw some conclusions at the end of this article.

So how did he do when we look at all the decisions?

In those 17 games we reviewed we have seen that Ref Dean had to make 2537 decisions in total. Our panel of referee reviewers found that he had 2166 of the decisions correct. This is a rather low mid-table score  compared to the other refs  we had in the PL.  So for being a Fifa ref not really convincing material to suggest that he was better than his colleagues on the field.

Of course for those who have been following us for a while,  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.

So Ref Dean does not have one of the best scores when we look at the general decisions. What matters more is seeing how his important decisions have been and this is something we can see in the next table.

In the 17 games we reviewed we saw that ref Dean had to make 1239 important decisions. And our panel found that he had 900 of those decisions correct. That is a score of 72,64%.  And yet again this is a rather low mid-table score and certainly not what we expect from a Fifa ref.

If we go in detail we see that he had a rather high score on the goal decisions. But with almost 10% wrong goal decisions I think this is not really what we want to see.  Goal decisions should be close to 100% correct for the whole season. We have seen other refs reach that number so maybe Fifa refs should get it right also.

If we look at the foul/free kick decisions we see that he gets a score of around 75%. Not the worst but certainly not the best score around.

The penalty decisions have a score of around 42%. Now of course we think this is too low but compared to other refs this is not really that bad.  The bad thing is that after a while you kind of get to accept bad numbers.

That can also be said of his yellow cards decisions. Compared to others this wasn’t completely bad but then again getting not even half of the decisions correct is somehow not really good.  And this number drops even significantly when we look at the second yellow cards. Only 16% correct is not really an impressive score.

When we look at his red cards decisions this is roughly the same. Not a complete disaster but still missing too many red cards.

Now let us move on to find out how his bias score was.

And when we reviewed ref Dean in his 17 games we had 15 different teams on the pitch. And being slightly generous we can say that 7 of those teams had a rather low bias score. Going from a small negative score against Chelsea and Southampton we notice a zero bias score for Reading.  And then we have a few teams with a very small positive bias like West Bromwich Albion, Manchester City, Swansea and Tottenham.

Teams who have a bigger positive bias are Manchester United and Wigan. And for those who have been following us over the last seasons these are no surprises. What might be more surprising is the two teams with the biggest positive bias. Sunderland and Aston Villa are the ‘lucky ones’.

Now if we move on to the teams who have a bigger negative bias we find Newcastle and Arsenal. Arsenal has had a terrible record over the last seasons under Dean. The seasons before Arsenal was by far the team that suffered from the errors of ref Dean. Somehow this seems to have changed a bit in the PL last season. Mind you such a bias score is still very bad but it has been worse in the past.

But now there are two teams who suffer even worse. And those teams are Fulham and West Ham United. And the bias against West Ham United is one of the worst I have seen.  Completely unacceptable.

FINAL CONCLUSION: Not a great score for a Fifa ref. We should raise the standard for FIFA refs a bit so we should see higher scores but this isn’t the case for Dean. Not just Dean as we have seen other FIFA refs not really having better scores than their non-Fifa refs colleagues.  Also very high bias numbers against some teams are not what we like to see in the bias table.  The only London team that seems to escape suffering from the errors of Dean is Tottenham. But all other London teams we saw in the games of Dean weren’t really favoured when he made mistakes.

 

• 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
• 35: Mark Clattenburg: good on red, poor on yellow
• 36: Mark Halsey: under half his penalty decisions were correct
• 37: Martin Atkinson.  This is not a Fifa ref
• 38: Michael Jones: Poor discipline
• 39: Michael Oliver: This doesn’t look too clever