EPL Ref Review tables 2012: Evaluating the decision-making competence

Damien Duff (l) and Philippe Senderos of Fulham appeal to referee Phil Dowd as he awards a penalty for hand ball during the Barclays Premier League match between Everton and Fulham at Goodison Park

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.

In the last weeks we have presented a report of each Premier League team and how the referees have treated them. We talked about the good decisions, and the wrong decisions and the bias we found in some team reports. But if you look at one report, you probably don’t have a clue how this relates to the rest of the league.

If you know your team was hit hard on the goal decisions it is a good thing (or bad thing) to know. But were the other teams hit harder by that type of decision or not? And to fill up this gap we will now present you a few different league tables.

If you see your team in position 1 it means that in their games the correct decisions on that type of call was high. In general this is a good thing of course. Because as football supporters, we want the refs to be correct.

Once again I would like to point that this is not a judgement on your favourite team in a way. It is a judgement of the refs and how they did in the games from your favorite team. If a team had lots of good decisions it still can be in a bad position when we look at the wrong calls. And also the other way round. A team that has a low score in correct decisions and thus having the refs making a mess of their games still could end up with a high bias in their favour when we look at those wrong decisions later on.

And in the next days, will also show the league table in which we show the position of the teams when it comes to bias. And when you look at those tables you will see if it evens out for your team, your rivals, your second team, a team you like, a team you hate… In one blink of an eye you will be able to find out. That will be articles to link to I think.

But now let us start with the first tables:

The correct decisions tables in which we show the competence of the refs in the games of the different teams.

	Correct decisions	unweighted	+/- Average	Nr Games
1	SWANSEA	81,730	9,240	8
2	ASTON VILLA	79,110	6,620	6
3	WBA	76,170	3,680	6
4	BLACKBURN	76,080	3,590	10
5	BOLTON	75,430	2,940	10
6	WIGAN	75,280	2,790	8
7	MAN C	74,750	2,260	32
8	LIVERPOOL	74,020	1,530	20
9	CHELSEA	73,320	0,830	32
10	TOTTENHAM	72,960	0,470	21
11	MAN U	72,800	0,310	32
12	EVERTON	72,460	-0,030	12
13	NEWCASTLE	72,290	-0,200	16
14	NORWICH	72,100	-0,390	11
15	SUNDERLAND	70,930	-1,560	14
16	ARSENAL	69,800	-2,690	38
17	QPR	68,550	-3,940	6
18	WOLVES	68,240	-4,250	8
19	FULHAM	65,450	-7,040	10
20	STOKE	64,480	-8,010	8

The first column is giving the “league position” of each team. Then you have the name. Then you have the percentage of correct decisions and in this table it is the un-weighted decisions. In the next column you see the difference with the total league average we found. In the last column you see the number of games we reviewed of said teams.

And so you see that we had 11 teams in which the ref scored better than the league average, meaning they got more calls correct. 9 of them got a lower score from the refs. The league average on all decisions was 72.490% correct calls.

You can also see that the difference between Swansea who in their games had 9.24% more correct decisions than the league average and the number in Stoke games where the refs had 8.01% decisions less correct than the league average. This means that there has been a difference of some 17% in correct calls in games from Swansea compared to games with Stoke in it. This is absolutely shocking!

And as the PL always portrays itself as the best league in the world, I think the referees in that league should also be the best in the world. So the 70% correct decisions is simply not good enough for the best league in the world. I think the line should be drawn around the 80% mark in general.

With Arsenal at position 16, there are teams who had worse refs in their games.

And now we will do the same with the weighted decisions.

	Correct decisions	weighted	+/- Average	Nr Games
1	SWANSEA	81,630	10,280	8
2	ASTON VILLA	79,810	8,460	6
3	WBA	75,910	4,560	6
4	BOLTON	75,180	3,830	10
5	WIGAN	75,100	3,750	8
6	BLACKBURN	74,670	3,320	10
7	MAN C	73,720	2,370	32
8	MAN U	72,580	1,230	32
9	NEWCASTLE	72,290	0,940	16
10	CHELSEA	71,700	0,350	32
11	TOTTENHAM	71,510	0,160	21
12	LIVERPOOL	71,500	0,150	20
13	EVERTON	71,350	0,000	12
14	NORWICH	71,250	-0,100	11
15	SUNDERLAND	69,980	-1,370	14
16	ARSENAL	68,640	-2,710	38
17	WOLVES	66,970	-4,380	8
18	QPR	66,300	-5,050	6
19	FULHAM	63,640	-7,710	10
20	STOKE	61,660	-9,690	8

And this will be no longer a surprise to see Swansea on top of the correct decisions table. The refs scored more than 10,28% better than the overall league average. And to see Stoke at the bottom will also be no real surprise. The refs scored 9.69% worse in their games. That is a difference of almost 20% between the first and the last team in this table!

The league average was 71,350% correct decisions.

Again I point at the fact that Arsenal also finished 16 in this table. And I just link that position goes some way to show that we sure didn’t “create” these numbers just to show how hard Arsenal has been done by the refs. If we would have judged the refs differently from the other teams we would have finished in the last position in these two tables.

No, some teams had much worse refs in their games than Arsenal.

If you take a look at those two tables you can also have a bit of an indication on how refs are when it comes to making important decisions. Not against or in favour of one team but it gives maybe an indication on how cautious refs are for some teams.

And again I stress that this is not yet saying: the refs got it for this team. No, it is just to see if refs make a difference when working with some teams.

And a team that goes up in the league table when you compare the unweighted decisions with the weighted, is Manchester United. In the first table they are in position 11 and are the team with the smallest positive outcome on correct decisions. But if you put weight on it, they rise to 8th position. This just shows that refs were more cautious in the more important decisions in games from Manchester United. The same goes for Newcastle. They go from 13th place to 9th place.

Liverpool is a team that has the opposite image. They go from 8th position to 12th in this table.

In the next article we will show the league tables with the ‘not so important’ decisions. We will show the league table of other decisions (fouls in the middle of the field), the offside decisions and the yellow card decisions.

Those are the decisions that have been weighted with 1 and 2 points in our weighted tables. In the article after that we will show the important decisions, the 3 pointers one could say like goals, penalties and red cards.

And then we will show which team had the biggest positive bias swing and who the biggest negative bias swing. All this in one blink of a eye.

Untold Arsenal will leave no stone unturned to show you how the state of referees was in the PL last season. And it sure doesn’t look great.