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.
Queens Park Rangers was a newcomer in the PL last season. They saved themselves on the last day of the season, despite losing that final game. But as Bolton lost at Stoke it was QPR that could remain in the top class of English football.
People who follow football will know that the sponsor of QPR is the same one that sponsors the referees. This is always a bit delicate, of course. So the question will be if we see anything that could suggest an unhealthy relation between QPR and the referees? Let us try and find out.
It is clear that we have left behind the 6 games teams and from now on we will start the teams we have done 8 games. 8 games meaning that we did more than 20% of their games and in this case we did 21,05% of the total games Queens Park Rangers played. So better than with Aston Villa and West Bromwich Albion, although still not really ideal.
If you want to be grumble about that….fine. We agree on this. We would have loved to have more games reviewed but unfortunately we were not able to review more games. Lack of matches shown on TV is one factor. The other factor is …lack of qualified referees to review more games. So if you want to join us and make sure that next season we will have an ever bigger number of games: please apply by putting a comment in the comment section and we will get back to you.
Now let us see how the decisions were made in the QPR games.
I could be very short on this: THIS IS BAD!!!!!!! The absolute minimum that is just acceptable is 70%. In the QPR games it went well below this line. 70% in referee decisions is the same as 50% in any other exam. The overall league average was 72,49% or 71,35 % and I think that is almost not acceptable.
If the PGMOL looks at this number they cannot be satisfied at all. Well I certainly am not satisfied. This is unacceptable. Let us try to see where it all went wrong.
The goal decisions…what can we say. This should be a number around 99% correct and we only have 86%. The referees have made a terrible mess of this.
But they didn’t mess up with the offside decisions. Still far away from the figure Mike Riley claimed of 99% of correct offside decisions but in this case better than the league average.
The refs certainly don’t look good in the other decisions. Some 4.5% worse than the league average. Not good at all, not good at all.
Also a big mess in the penalty decisions. Some 10% worse than the league average. Messy numbers.
The red cards are better than the league average. Which itself was unacceptable low. This is better but far from what can be found reasonable. The yellow cards are also not good.
Sorry my friends from the PGMOL this is not good. Let us try to see who benefited from all those wrong decisions.
When I saw these numbers coming out of the database I was shocked. This is one of the surprise packages that we found in our review system. Instead of the negative away bias from around 1.826 we find on average, the Queens Park Rangers have a positive bias from 1.800! That is the opposite to what you can expect!
The home bias is….just amazing. Just 0.001 away from a positive bias of 13.000!!! Remember the overall positive league average is 1.826 so this means that they have 7 times more than what can be expected! 7 times more than what any other team could expect!
These numbers are mind blowing. Let us see if the weighted numbers bring a bit of perspective to this.
And to my surprise… the negative away bias goes down a bit but really the normal number is – 2.619 and QPR has a + 1.6000 in their favour. And the normal average positive home bias in the league is 2.619 and for QPR it is 18.667. That is again 7 times better than what we can expect.
So now we not just have a bad referee performances overall but they clearly also went mostly one way in favour of QPR. So let us see who those refs were…
Well Lee Mason and Howard Webb clearly were not the ones responsible for this mess. Okay they made mistakes but most of the time against QPR. So they are not the ones for this out of proportion positive score for QPR.
The real QPR refs in last season have been Chris Foy, Martin Atkinson and top of the class was Mike Dean! Those 3 refs have given QPR an enormous amount of wrong calls. Certainly the score of Mike Dean raises questions. Let us see how things stand when we put weight to it.
Lee Mason was very much anti QPR one can see. This is also very suspicious on the wrong side of things. Could this have been in a game that other things were at stake? If we keep in mind the other scores the score from Howard Webb looks even decent even if it us way out of line and far away from the zero score that it should be.
And the other refs, who all have done 2 games of QPR, are just mind blowing in giving all and every doubtful decision in favour of QPR. Let us see if we can see how all this affected the results QPR managed to get.
The first over positive bias game brought them points as did the 6th game in which they also got a very big positive bias. In between was one game with a positive bias but they didn’t manage to get any points from that. It works on most occasions but not always it seems.
The one game with a very negative bias didn’t bring them any points. But for the rest it looks that any game that was remotely fair or against them they dropped points big time – only huge swings in their favour gave them 3 points.
So it seems helpful to get the wrong calls from the ref to get points and it is difficult to win points when the ref doest the opposite.
FINAL CONCLUSION:
All in all in the games that involved Queens Park Rangers the refs had poor overall performance and made more than the average “not correct” calls.
The worst part of it is that those wrong calls favoured Queens Park Rangers in a big way. Refs can make mistakes but if they go that blatant to just one team then this is something that should raise eyebrows.
Two refs had a negative bias and 3 refs had a very very big positive bias in favour of Queens Park Rangers.
It is likely that the biased positive wrong decisions in the games we reviewed have helped QPR to win some extra points.
And then the only question that needs an answer is: why?
And then we enter difficult grounds. Has it anything to do with the sponsor? I really, really hope that this is not the case. But the fact that the PGMOL and QPR have the same company as a sponsor leaves a somewhat sour taste in mouth.
I can only suggest the PGMOL should make an end to this sponsorship relation with this company. In the lights of these numbers some things could be suggested. The PGMOL has to act to prevent such things to be suggested. And I don’t mean that they should shut us up, no they should make sure that whoever sponsors them, they have no connections with any other club in the PL.
Some of the games…
- Ref Review: Man City 3 QPR 2
- Man U 2 QPR 0
- QPR v Arsenal – the ref review
- Tottenham 3 QPR 1
- Newcastle – QPR
- QPR – Man City
There is a full index in our referee’s section.
- Ref Review: Team by Team – West Bromwich Albion
- Ref Reviews, Team by Team:Aston Villa
- Who played for Arsenal in the opening games - and what does it tell us?
- What was it like in the crowd – at Arsenal 100 years ago
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Publication on July 20th: Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football.
The book that re-writes the Arsenal story.
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Keep up the good work! @Untold Team and the regular posters
I wonder if some of the posters calling this website’s investigations a conspiracy theory do not have a vested interest in the matter…
Statto,
It has more of a chance in doing something than your actions (nothing)
I love the title of this report
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/airline-business/2012/05/airasia-premier-dishes-out-the.html
I’d start with a reasoned response to the evidence. that’s just me.
Why is it that are old ‘friend’ Mike Dean crops up yet again eh!
@ Robert at 11:31 – Also take Shaun Derry’s sending off at united where Ashley Young dives from an offside position, within the first ten minutes of the game as I recall. Away at United, a player down, penalty scored a goal down. This surely carries more weight than QPR getting a player sent off at home to Totternham at the end of the game? – this is a good point. Is this a flaw with the ref reviews ? How often do players get sent off early at Old Trafford (normally very harshly as well) and yet when a Manu player gets sent off isn’t it normally a lot later in the game. The incorrect decision would carry a lot more weight earlier in the game.
Have you even started gathering your evidence? I very much doubt it. As I said, you are doing nothing!
Micko & Robert,
A factor that has been discussed on here about how refs seem to do things during the course of a game in order to say they evened things out.
What a load of utter nonsense. This whole thing is made up of stats I bet you can not back up. QPR were subjected to a huge number of vital decisions that went against QPR last season. Disallowed goals, unwarranted red cards, blatant incorrect offside decisions. Sounds like a bunch of aggrieved Man U and Arsenal supporters to me with far too much time on their hands. Jog on!
Alfie if you would care to look at the actual ref reviews themselves you will see otherwise. But still, we’ve had enough of this, and yours is the last such post. See the current post for why.
QPR FANS
You suggest the eight games reviewed are an unrepresentative sample (I’d agree with this because the team that came up was better than Swansea/Norwich – there is no way they should have outperformed you in the top flight) but you have even less data than we do. You are the guy who brought a gun with no bullets to a knife fight.
As an aside, if you can persuade a QPR supporting ref to watch that other team in Fulham a few times, we’d love to have a control sample for referee bias. They might enjoy watching AR53NAL – CHEL53A again though.
Stuart
July 16, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Have you even started gathering your evidence? I very much doubt it. As I said, you are doing nothing!
So your saying that doing something poorly is better than doing nothing? Like I said before all your evidence shows is refs are poor, we all know that we don’t need evidence. You do however need evidence to support you claims of bias which you do not have nor have you started to collect evidence of any bias. How would you even go towards proving that incompetence is biased, they are mistakes and the honesty of them is purely speculative.
To be honest, and I hope my fellow QPR fans agree, we were used to poor referees in the Championship and hoped for an improvement in the top flight but if anything it got worse. More incorrect decisions one way or another but they went both ways and two sets of flawed analysis proves the same as a million sets of flawed analysis …. nothing because it’s flawed, inaccurate or erroneous if you prefer, take your pick. You’d be better off looking for brown envelopes.
Ben,
we could have left the little teams out of this. But we also felt that we had to give them what we had. And if that is the result of what we had, we had to give it to whoever is reading.
We have judged over 7.000 decisions in the 154 games we did. Judged as a ref with the laws of the game in hand.
If others have done the same we should and would swap our numbers with pleasure to see if something is wrong.
And yes in those 7.000 decisions some things might be wrong.
But the whole year we have asked people to point us at what is wrong. Some 11 months anyone could argue each and every line or decision. Some have and in some case we have admitted a mistake or when our ref reviewers put a 0 where a 1 should have been put or the other war round.
But after putting 7.000 decisions together and nobody complaining any more the only thing we could do is analyse the numbers that at that moment nobody disputed any more.
And when we saw what we saw suddenly hell broke lose and we get mud thrown at our heads because the final outcome doesn’t suit you or your team… then it is a bit late I think.
You could have come earlier and said: well in that game X – Y in minute 7 you say that player x scored a valid goal. But it should have been a goal disallowed because you cannot attack a keeper when he is in the air of the 6 yard box attempting to catch a cross as this is against the laws of the games and the instructions as is written on page 45 of the Fifa instructions. And then we will check that and if you are right we will correct this.
But it should have been done at the time when the reviews came on line. Now it is a bit too late and now just wipe it off the table is a bit too easy.
I want things to change in the referee world. Not because I like change for the change. But because after 2 years of reviewing games I can tell you: we need a change. And I actually don’t give a toss if it would have cost my team 5 points or would won my team 3 points.
In fact, I want to stop reviewing referees and go back to enjoying the football. But as long as there is no change…I will carry on reviewing and try to find more people to join this battle to reform the referees in football and to make it fair for all.
A (r)evolution has to start somewhere…
I am a regular follower of RefReview series and Guyz this is an awesome job.
One suggestion Tony, If you could give links to the pages of each match that was reviewed, it would be really helpful. For instance, if you could group all those refreview pages of QPR under one page and give that link here(which summarizes overall performance), it would be easy for the guyz to understand.
I believe this will end all those quarrels of “Where is your data to support this?”.
To add to my point, I could see 4 matches listed under this article but two without any links. It would be easy If I could see links for 8 QPR matches that were reviewed in one page.
Pad Gooner,
we will try to add that information in the future.
But it is something we have to look up and add manually to the article and I admit to sometimes forget it.
But if people type the name of the team at the top of the page in the red where it says ‘search here’ and then press enter they should get the reviews and the articles related to the games of said team.
But will try to add them in the future
I am a QPR fan, and I laughed at this. You must have reviewed some of our rare good decision matches. We had about 10 or so crap decisions against us last season, including SWP’s disallowed goal vs West Brom, Clint Hill’s disallowed header vs Bolton, Shaun Derry’s sending off while United won a penalty, Taarabt’s sending off vs Spurs….and in some matches the ref’s were blatantly giving decisions against us on purpose. Decisions against us last season was just unacceptable, we were getting them almost every game! The one’s you must have reviewed, again I’d say were our rare games where good decisions were made
Sure Walter. I thought for new comers it would be easy to locate relevant pages before starting mudslinging.
Walter,
I had noticed that Man Utd was mentioned. No need to change the type size. Im a QPR fan and was trying to be constructive but understand its hard when your getting alot of flak on here.
I admit I dont fully understand everything here as I haven’t had a chance to read the explanations fully but was simply making the point that decisions at different points in a game of football make huge differences on the Outcome.
For example a Team on top for the first 40 mins without scoring in a game only to conceed before half time and go on to lose 1-0, when this goal shouldnt have been allowed these decisions cost the match where as the same decision when your 3-0 up doesn’t have a lasting impact.
That decision at Man Utd for QPR being the singly handedly worst decision I could think to dream up. And as conspiricy theories go I never wanted to believe Man Utd get all the decisions but now I’m not sure.
I hope that your website can continue to do this as its important work but hopefully with a bigger sample of games, or even two people doing each sampled game. (Again im not sure exactly how you work).
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22066
@Robert, First a disclaimer, I am a visitor much like you and I am not a referee reviewer.
There is an explanation given in that link on how refs are scored. First two paragraph more or less tell us about how decisions are weighed.
For critical decisions like goals, penalties and red cards, refs would get 3 points for correct decisions and 0 points for wrong decisions.
So lets take your example.
In the first case, lets for this explanation sake assume that there was only one important decision which is that goal which should not have been allowed. So the ref would get 0 points out of possible 3. Which would give ref a pathetic 0% correct result.
In your second case, the ref gave 3 correct goals and one incorrect goal. So he would get 9 out of possible 12 points. So he would get 75% correct result.
So even by these numbers we can tell that Ref1 is pathetic and ref2 is ok.
If you want to know how a full match is reviewed, you can take a look at this link(MANC vs QPR)
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/21819
@Nick – yes, we do need more matches – I put in a memo about this in the very first data-article of this series specific to the QPR data here:
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/22277
To quote: “Also it should be noted that teams such as QPR have only had 8 matches reviewed and, in their case, 2 of these matches involved a couple of real stinkers (or outliers) from Mike Dean Vs Arsenal – so their position in this table is perhaps not representative of their entire season.”
Regular readers and followers of this series would no doubt have taken that on board.
The significance of course will be calculated at the end of this series – I think one poster asked about that and they are correct, there may be little statistical significance given the sample size.
We would love to review more games so if you have access to full match videos then get in contact and/or you know some qualified referees who are willing to give some time it would be very much appreciated!
Also – other posters – quite frankly asking us to swallow the theory that brave little QPR battled against all odds to avoid relegation because: “that’s what we reckon” is well… tell you what – we’ll give you a few more seasons of shite refereeing and you will realise that you will finish in the EPL table pretty much exactly where you are told to finish – nothing more, nothing less.
If they wanted you down you would have gone down.
Could anyone tell me which games were in the sample? Sorry as I’ve asked before and may have received a response but I can’t seem to find it. Cheers.
Please can you post a link to the system you use? Also explaining the Low Medium and High rating.
Next season id like to do this while watching a stream of QPR games to see if you are right. My gut is telling me we did get some incorrect decisions for us, but we had some major major decisions against us game changing ones. I can count at least 9 more points we should have got last season.
When reviewing 6 or 8 games for a team it’s not a fair to then compare with others where you have a fairer representation.
Also we lost five of the six games you’ve listed (I don’t know what the other two were), so how has this helped us? No advantage has been gained overall here.
I think ther review of the small number of QPR games highlights the problem of refereeing bias in the Premier League.
The small number of games reviewed shows that, depending on who is playing, there is a massive swing from one game to the next.
It seems to me that QPR is the best example of one team being a pawn in the game depending on who they are playing and who the referee is.
QPR fans shouldn’t be moaning about this analysis but asking “what the hell happened in those 8 games?”
Ben, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. If you want any further response from me go back and look at the game reviews (all 8 of them) and come back to me with your assessment, I’m not wasting any further time with you pointless moaning, because that’s all it is. You don’t understand what has been done because you are only looking at the end result and are ignorant of the hard work that has been done here.
um…
the question of whether tune group’s sponsorship of referees (given the owners’ connections to qpr’s owners) is, of course, valid. but… before looking at that one, there’s a starter question – is an analysis of referees’ performance over a combination of two games against arsenal and an incomplete review of televised games (6 from 12 here) sound if it has been done by arsenal fans?
this article claims high bias against arsenal in both home and away matches against (although it barely registers on a qpr fan’s list of contentious refereeing decisions from 2011/12). the other articles (and the couple of other arsenal ref reviews on this site that i managed to find – it’s a difficult website for a stranger to navigate!) also seem to show that arsenal are usually viewed as being on unfairly treated by referees – interested to see how mind-boggling the numbers in a review of the arsenal matches would turn out to be.
of course, redo this analysis of the qpr games without the arsenal games and what does it show? nothing mind-boggling at all… a slight, although probably not statistically valid, bias against qpr.
Hi Everyone,
Just a quick update for you, we have some exposure on a QPR blog now, hopefully this will bring more refs and more importantly, some non Arsenal refs.
http://qprreport.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=32599