Arsenal is being screwed by the referees. The evidence from 3 different sources « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade
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Our thoughts are of course with Fabrice Muamba.
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By Walter Broeckx
This article is a follow up of the article about the wrong calls going against WBA and QPR. The aim is to reveal a few things about the wrong calls and about other websites that also are working around the things we have do over here.
As far as I know there are 3 websites that are keeping an eye on refs. We are doing our ref reviews here at Untold. Then there is the debatable decision website. And then there is another blog called football is fixed.
First I will try to tell a bit about the websites. On Untold Arsenal we review the whole games from the first till the last minute. We look at each decision a ref makes and also look at the decisions a ref had to make but didn’t make. And we do this all over the field. We put all this in our reviews that you can see almost every day of the week. Indeed shortly after this article is published we will release a couple more such reviews.
And I should add we focus on each call/non call all over the field because as a ref myself I know that you can tilt a game by calling or not calling some fouls across the field of play. Because of not having enough ref reviewers we focus on the top teams in the EPL. (If we had more on our team we would of course publish more reviews).
The Debatable Decision website only looks at the big and important calls. They use MOTD reports and take a look at the major moments. Now I do appreciate what they are doing but if I may be critical about them I would say they are working in a not completely correct way.
A big difference is for example that Untold Arsenal looks at the “incident” and our conclusion can be: the call was correct or not correct. If it was difficult for the ref to see then that is something we can use in our comment and excuse the ref for his mistake but we will not use it as an excuse to mark a wrong call as correct. I have seen on the Debatable Decision website where they have called the Blackburn offside goal as a correct decision because: ‘it was difficult to see’. Difficult or not: it was a wrong decision and had to be called like that.
The Football is Fixed blog is something completely different. But if you want to read about strange things in football this is a great place to take a look every now and then and you will see some strange very strange flukes on this site.
The debatable decision website has a league table where you can see a table with the influence on the points from all the wrong calls. I hope they don’t mind but I will copy it over here in this article
Decisions Table
| Team | Played | For | Against | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stoke | 27 | 21 | 6 | 15 |
| 2 | Bolton | 27 | 13 | 3 | 10 |
| 3 | QPR | 27 | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| 4 | Fulham | 27 | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 5 | Sunderland | 27 | 10 | 8 | 2 |
| 6 | Wolves | 27 | 10 | 8 | 2 |
| 7 | A. Villa | 27 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 8 | Norwich | 27 | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| 9 | Newcastle | 27 | 9 | 9 | 0 |
| 10 | Blackburn | 27 | 6 | 6 | 0 |
| 11 | Swansea | 27 | 5 | 6 | -1 |
| 12 | Wigan | 27 | 5 | 7 | -2 |
| 13 | Tottenham | 27 | 10 | 13 | -3 |
| 14 | Liverpool | 26 | 8 | 12 | -4 |
| 15 | Chelsea | 27 | 7 | 11 | -4 |
| 16 | Man City | 27 | 5 | 9 | -4 |
| 17 | Man Utd | 27 | 5 | 10 | -5 |
| 18 | Everton | 26 | 4 | 9 | -5 |
| 19 | WBA | 27 | 8 | 14 | -6 |
| 20 | Arsenal | 27 | 5 | 14 | -9 |
In this table being on number one is meaning that you are having a lot of big calls going in your favour. Being in position 20, oh look it is Arsenal, is meaning that you have things going against you. And this based on the important decisions.
Now I will add our own wrong calls league table and this is based on percentages on decisions going against you all over the field. So there could be some differences but also some patterns you could see when comparing both tables.
| Team | Games | Wrong | Average/match | % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mu | 20 | 83 | 4 | 30,59 |
| 2 | Sto | 7 | 35 | 5 | 32,5 |
| 3 | Swa | 4 | 9 | 2 | 37,95 |
| 4 | QPR | 4 | 22 | 6 | 38,82 |
| 5 | Bol | 7 | 30 | 4 | 40,25 |
| 6 | Sun | 7 | 30 | 4 | 41,8 |
| 7 | AVI | 4 | 17 | 4 | 42,85 |
| 8 | MC | 21 | 106 | 5 | 44,4 |
| 9 | Liv | 16 | 76 | 5 | 45,67 |
| 10 | Tot | 12 | 69 | 6 | 46,2 |
| 11 | New | 7 | 44 | 6 | 46,61 |
| 12 | Nor | 8 | 33 | 4 | 48,01 |
| 13 | Ful | 8 | 49 | 6 | 49,07 |
| 14 | Che | 23 | 148 | 6 | 51,05 |
| 15 | Bla | 7 | 32 | 5 | 51,56 |
| 16 | Wig | 5 | 20 | 4 | 57,6 |
| 17 | Eve | 7 | 52 | 7 | 60,04 |
| 18 | Wol | 4 | 27 | 7 | 61,34 |
| 19 | WBA | 4 | 28 | 7 | 69,2 |
| 20 | Ars | 28 | 317 | 11 | 77,98 |
So this is our table based on the games we have reviewed so far this season. And again being in first place is meaning that the refs make few mistakes against you and oh look it is Manchester United who seem to be the favourite flavour of the refs. And oh well in last place we have again Arsenal meaning for some reason the refs don’t like us that much.
Now the big difference is of course that in the first table they have only looked at important wrong calls and in the second table we have counted all wrong calls. So you will see sometimes a difference in the league table. Manchester United is having some problems with important calls so far (Stoke and Newcastle come to mind) but for the rest the refs are very well for them. And a game is often won in the midfield battle and in this area United is getting the benefit of the calls.
Arsenal is just on the wrong end of wrong calls be they important or not. Just as WBA is for some reason. And Everton is also receiving a lot of wrong calls. It will be interesting to see how our game develops this time.
A very interesting article about this also appeared on the football is fixed blog and if you take a look at those numbers you see that they come almost to the same conclusion as Untold Arsenal (oh you know a biased Arsenal blog) but also the not Arsenal related website the debatable decision comes to almost the same conclusion.
So as far as I know there are 3 blogs/websites who are taking a look at the refs and their decisions. And all 3 of them come to the conclusion that Arsenal is the most screwed team in the EPL.
Dear Mr. Riley, as you are so keen on pointing out that +93% of the decisions are correct how come that 3 websites (of whom 2 are not related to Arsenal) come to the conclusion that the refs from the PGMOL cost us points and show a bias against Arsenal?
Explain this Mr. Riley if you can.
Below I added a graphic of the wrong calls against the teams. The higher the number the worse things are for the teams in question.
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Other recent articles on corruption and refereeing…
Why does West Bromwich Albion, like Arsenal, get so many wrong calls?
PGMOL – the referees’ association: a secret body in breach of its own terms of reference
Untold Ref Review: Man U 2 WBA 0
Barca Vice President reveals the scandal of Barca’s match fixing activities
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