Referee Review 2012: The London Clubs. And now we find the bias.

LONDON, ENGLAND – MAY 06: Joey Barton the Queens Park Rangers captain talks with match referee Andre Marriner during the Barclays Premier League match between Queens Park Rangers and Stoke City at Loftus Road on May 6, 2012 in London, England. 

By DogFace and Walter Broeckx

Untold Arsenal has a team of qualified referees who have reviewed more than 40% of the EPL games from last season. The reviews themselves were based on full match video footage with the advantage of video technology features such as slow motion and pause.

By reviewing those 155 games we have made a database of more than 7000 decisions that have been judged by our panel of dedicated and qualified referees.

The numbers you will see are based on those decisions and those reviewed games.

Teams include:

Arsenal
Chelsea
Fulham
Queens Park Rangers
Tottenham Hotspur

The first thing is that this is the highest reviewed region in terms of percentage. In this region, we have a team which has seen all 38 games reviewed in Arsenal. Chelsea have been reviewed 32 games, Tottenham Hotspur, 21 times. We’ve reviewed more than 50% of the games of these three teams. Fulham have been reviewed 10 times and Queens Park Rangers, being a newcomer in the PL, has been reviewed 8 times.

Before we go further in terms of numbers, we must point out that there are no referees from London or the Greater London area in the PL. We think it is strange that the most populated area in England has no refs who make it to the top. Is there a problem with recruiting? Or is there another problem? A problem where the little circle of refs wants to be kept little?

But those questions are for later. Let us now see how these non-London refs officiated the London teams and how competent they were.

This region has the lowest number of correct calls, just below the Midlands, And some 2% below the league average. The same goes for the weighted numbers: the lowest overall and 2% below the league average.

At first sight the refs didn’t perform their best while refereeing London teams.  Let us now look at the different type of decisions and see if there is anything strange.

The goal decisions are slightly worse than normal, but there is not much difference to be seen.  The officials did their best when they were judging the offside decisions. Slightly fewer mistakes were made or could be judged, and thus given correct by our referee reviewers.

In the other decisions we see that the number is not as good as the league average. Not by much, but still just under 30% of the general decisions were wrong.  The penalty decisions were also not as good as the league average.

In terms of yellow and red cards, there is only a slight difference between the overall league average and the London region numbers.  Let us try to look at how many wrong calls were given. Who benefited and who didn’t?

The Bias Against London

And now we get to see something really strange. If we look at the away bias, we see that London teams face a big bias: the highest of the whole league. Twice the usual away bias a team could have against it compared to the league average.

That being already amazing (the highest away bias against the London region teams), the home bias is maybe even more so. Because when London teams play at home, there seems to be no home bias any more.  There is a negative bias against the home teams in London.

When we put weight to it, we see the same anomalies. The away bias is the highest visible from any region. And the home bias is still in the negative for teams from London. So when we look at all the London teams combined, there is no such thing as a home bias in this region. Let us see if there are differences in bias between the teams.

We see that two teams got very high numbers of decisions going their way. Queens Park Rangers and Fulham had some rather big decisions going their way in the games we reviewed.  Tottenham were also beneficiaries when mistakes were made during the season.

Chelsea are one of those teams that look to coming close to even out. In fact, all the numbers are rather close to each other both in their terms of their favour and against them.

The bias against Arsenal

And then we have Arsenal. The only London team where there is a big negative bias swing in terms of wrong decisions.

When we put weight to the decisions we see the same image. Queens Park Rangers and Fulham have a nice positive swing in the numbers, which are a lot higher compared to the non weighted decisions. Tottenham also have a higher positive bias number.

Chelsea have gone down a little, but not by much, and they stay in the positive area.

And Arsenal remain Arsenal: the highest negative bias swing of all teams in London and beyond. ‘If you can give it against Arsenal, just give it’ seems to be the word amongst referees.

If we look at the referees we see that we have had 18 referees in the London games. And only 4 of them had a positive bias score for London teams. This means that 14 had a negative bias when refereeing London teams. Anthony Taylor seems to be the worst ref for London but he only did one game with a London team so this cannot be reliable. The same could be said about Stuart Attwell with only 2 games to his name. But we then have a string of referees who refereed more games like Mason, Dowd, Foy and a few others with clear negative bias against London teams.

And again, if we put weight the picture remains the same with around 77% of the refs having a negative bias number when London teams are involved in their games.

The final conclusion:

Poor overall numbers for the refs in general at first sight with some of the lowest totals in general and well below the league average. But the negative results are mainly due to one team. So it seems that there is not a general anti London feeling amongst the refs.

Queens Park Rangers seems to have a rather good relationship with the referees.  Well at least in the games we reviewed. And Fulham doesn’t have much reason to complain about the refs in last season.

Tottenham also had a few things going their way but if all goes well we could shed some perspective on that when we talk about individual teams.  Chelsea came closest  to evening out (one could say) from last season.

And Arsenal? Arsenal should move. Moving to the North West maybe would be helpful.