REF REVIEW 2012: Queens Park Rangers – “These numbers are mind blowing” « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

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…

There is a full index in our referee’s section.

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The book that re-writes the Arsenal story.

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