Sunday, June 24th, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx

Dear Untold readers, (and also Dear new readers who visit us over here for the first time),

Welcome to a new series of articles that we are about to present you.  In the next days and weeks you will be able to see what is more or less top secret.  Untold will give you evidence on how things stand when it comes to referees in the Premier League.

Our hard working team of referee reviewers have been reviewing game after game of this season in the PL. They have been judging games from the first till the last minute. And all those reports have been put online during the season so that everyone could have a look at what we found.

We named and judged each incident in the games we reviewed. And all the data from these games has been put together in an attempt to judge the referees and the PGMOL (the shadowy organisation that runs the refs in the PL) and to see how teams have been doing under the refs they got.

The season before last season this website made a first attempt to do this. We then did all the Arsenal games from that season. That was 10% of all the Premier League games. At the end of that season people said to us that to gain more credibility we had to come up with more data.  We had to do games that involved other teams apart from Arsenal. So we took on this challenge to do more.

And we went further. In fact I think we went further than ever before.  In a few lines I will tell you how far we have been going but I can tell you now that I think what this blog has done is that it has written history.

Other sites have been doing things about referees. But no other site has done things the way we done it. An open way of working. With all the numbers, all the decisions open to the audience. We didn’t come up with a final score asking the people to believe us. No we showed each decisions, each judgement, each call or non-call and said what was wrong.

As you will know there are 10 games each match day of the season. And there are 38 matches to be played by each team. So the total numbers of games played in the PL each season is 380 games.

And we, that is the referees who had dedicated all their spare time to this project have been working hard. We have been working like mad. And the final outcome is well even for me amazing. At first I hoped we would be able to double our games. From 38 to 76 games. And I then secretly dreamed of reaching the magical number of doing 100 games in a season. Well we all can dream can we.

But thanks to the gigantic and unseen devotion from the ref reviewers I now can proudly say that we have surpassed not only my first dream but even my big dream of doing 100 games.

When I saw the final number I must admit that I hardly could believe it. And I must say that I really was very excited about it. Very, very excited.

So here it is our team of ref reviewers has reviewed 155 PL games this season. And if you got your calculators close to you and you start calculating you will see that this is 40.78947368421053 % of all the PL games of last season.

Yes Untold Arsenal has managed to review more than 40% of all the PL games.  That is an average of 4 games each day. I must say that there is no prouder referee reviewer out there than me – and my little team of ref reviewers.

All the numbers have been gathered, written down, sorted, looked at, checked and examined  to see how it all relates with each other. We have put them in a big database and then it was time for a specialist to dig something from those numbers.

All this will be presented to you in the next days and weeks.

If you still want to laugh at us, if you want to say that we are rubbish at what we do, fine. But also, why don’t you show to us where we are wrong? Why don’t you  show us  your data? Why don’t you show us your numbers?

If you have more data fine. If you have more numbers fine. Open them up and show them to the world. And then we can debate what you have found. If you don’t have this then I think you just have to accept that what we gathered is the most detailed referee reviewing in the PL ever in history beyond the secret numbers gathered by PGMOL or the FA.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank all who have been involved in this. And who have  made this possible.   Tony for opening his blog to us, my little team of ref reviewers and of course the one and only Dogface for doing the work behind the scenes and if you see nice graphics and tables, they are from his hands.

So Untold has written history by doing what we did. I invite you to read history in the next days and weeks. I invite you to read what never has been done before in the open way we did it. Join us in our search to see how the refs have done in the last season.

We will start this series with an introduction to explain to you how we came to all this and the road we have walked since a few years. I hope you enjoy the series. I hope you will enjoy  it as much as we did it while doing the reviews.

And remember when you look at the numbers: we have analysed over 40% of all the PL games this season, second by second, and on that basis we draw our conclusions.

Check this website in the next days as the series will start very soon now.

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