REF REVIEW 2012: Everton – some refs like them some don’t « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

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If you think you know your Arsenal, it is time to think again. Woolwich Arsenal, the club that changed football.

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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.

I don’t know if there is an equivalent of St. Totteringhamsday in Liverpool with Liverpool celebrating the fact that Everton cannot overtake them any more in the league table. It sure didn’t happen this season as Everton finished in front of Liverpool. So I can imagine the Toffees being a happy bunch. But let’s check if they were always happy with the refs this season.

We reviewed 12 games of Everton. And this is the first team in our end of year analysis for which we reviewed over 30%. 31.58% to be exact. That is around almost 1 game in  3. So the outcome of the results should become more reliable in total.

But if you are still not satisfied with this and you want us to do more games you should give us a helping hand. If you know a qualified referee ask him to join our referee review team.  Otherwise we have to accept that not all is perfect in the world and maybe in some of the numbers. But let us see what we can see if we look at the numbers from those 12 games.

If we look at the un-weighted total decisions we see that this is almost the same as the league average.

And if we put weight on it…it is exactly the same as the overall league average we found!

So what else is there to say about that? Maybe that we would have like an higher average score and thus a higher score in the Everton games? Let us see how this looks like when take a look at the different type of decisions.

The goal decisions were some 2.3% better than the league average. Which is still too low. Like I have said before goals decides who gets the points so this should be at least correct with a score of 99%.

The offside are worse than the league average. Not by much but the difference between the 99% that Mike Riley claimed and this score of not even 89% is a big gap.

The other decisions are slightly under the league average. Only just in above the 70% border line.

Only 50% of the penalty decisions were correct. 12% under the low league average and in fact totally unacceptable. This is the most important decision type just behind the goal decisions so should be much much higher.

The red cards decisions in Everton games was a joke I think. Not one correct decision in those games….

We can get a bit of consolation when we look at the yellow cards. But not much in fact. A score of just under 59% correct decisions is rather low. But at least this number is some 2% higher than the league average.

So not really impressive numbers. Let us see if we can find someone who was happy with those very average numbers.

The normal negative bias away from that a team can face is -1.826. Everton had to face a negative bias number of -1.600. So we could say they had to face the normal away bias in general in their 5 away games we reviewed.

The normal positive bias in the league is +1.826 and Everton comes close but only just with 1.714. So a bit lower than normal.  This leaves them with a small positive bias in their favour in total. But very close to the zero score in fact.

If we put weight on the decisions we usually see a negative bias away from home of – 2.619. Everton only has a negative bias of -1.200. So much lower than normal.

But at home they didn’t get the normal positive bias swing that the league average has shown. They are a bit under the normal +2.619 positive swing. Not by much but still a bit of a strange situation with having a smaller negative away bias against them but at home the refs gave them less.

The end result however is still a positive bias swing in their favour but not a big one.

Let us have a look at the different refs.

We had 8 different refs in 12 games with Everton.  And nicely spread out 4 with a negative bias against them and 4 with a positive bias in their favour.

Martin Atkinson had a big negative swing against them. Phil Dowd also had a rather bad game for Everton. Mark Halsey seemingly being bad on both occasions. Michael Jones did 3 games in total and had a negative bias in total but not a real over the top big one.

On the positive side for Everton we had Webb with a small positive bias score. Kevin Friend with a bigger one. And then we have Lee Mason with a very big bias swing. People who have been following Untold and the ref previews will not be surprised by that.

Peter Walton also had a big positive bias in favour of Everton in his game.

If we put weight on the decisions we see that the score from Martin Atkinson has gone down even more. Also Phil Dowd stays ahead of Halsey in this table. Meaning he messed up a bit more in Everton games. Mark Halsey his number also goes up a bit.

Michael Jones manages to get a lower score. This indicates that the mistakes he made was more on the little calls in the field than on the big ones.

The score from Webb remains reasonable. The score from Kevin Friend is starting to give me some uncomfortable feelings.

The scores from Mason and Walton are …well a bit over the top I would say. Maybe good for Everton but bad for football, referees and the image of the PGMOL.

At the start of the season we see a few games with a bit negative bias against Everton. And as a result they didn’t get much points in those games.  In week 23 they had a game with a big bias in their favour and they won that game. The exception to this is the game from week 29 when they had a big bias in general decisions but couldn’t capitalise on it.

FINAL CONCLUSION

If we look at the last table we see that having the ref having a negative bias score can lead to losing points. A positive swing usually gives more points. Not every time but most of the time.

They had a few games with an amazing high bias in their favour but also a couple of games with a big bias against them.  We could say that in 6 of the 12 games we did, the refs did rather well with small bias lines. But in the other games things look very bad for the refs and as a result for the teams on the field.

Some links to the games we did

 Manchester United – Everton
Everton – Sunderland
Everton – Tottenham
Liverpool – Everton
Everton – Arsenal
Everton – Chelsea
Everton – Manchester City
Arsenal – Everton
Everton – Manchester United
Manchester City – Everton
Everton – Liverpool

Editorial Footnote: Occasionally readers wish to make the point that our figures or methods are themselves fixed or biased.  If you have such a view and wish to argue that point please do take a look at our article on data and conclusions first.   If you want to see past articles in this series they are at EPL REFEREE REVIEW 2012- An historic study on the refs in the EPL

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