REF SHOCKER: 32% of all decisions in Arsenal matches are wrong! Ref Stats part 1 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Walter Broeckx

Our hard working team of ref reviewers have finished the season at this moment already. Although we’ve only worked on 9 matchdays we managed to do 38 games which we have reviewed until now. So the same number as I did EPL games on my own last season.

First I like to say a big thank you to my team and I really appreciate the time and effort they put in these reviews. And nobody better placed than me to know what it takes not only time wise but also on the mental side. Because believe me reviewing a game that your favourite team loses is not always easy.

But we did our job and so after only 9 games in the season we can look at the same numbers that we could only look at, at the end of May. 38 games played, 38 games reviewed. Now let us see what the numbers are saying.

So first I will start with the Arsenal games. Et voila….

I have tried to put this in a nice graphical way and also add the numbers to it. So you see that of all the decisions on yellow cards around 65% can be considered as correct. When it comes to red cards…only 20% can be considered justified.

Let’s look for a better score in the penalties. Well it is better but still only 36% of the penalty decisions are correct in Arsenal games. Now that is poor. Very poor. But things can get better and if we look at the goals we see that almost 85% of the goals are correctly judged. That is if you look at it from the bright side.

But if you look at it from the other side this means that not all goals are correct. Not even 9 out of 10 goals are correct. No this means 15% of the goal decisions are wrong. And then to think that goals are what football is about. This should be 100% or at least somewhere in the area of 99% correct decisions. How long before football authorities will do something about it?

And if we add the poor result on the other decisions (meaning all calls that had an impact on other things Eg: judging a foul that leads to a red card) of around 55% correct we come up with a total score of just under 63% of all the important decisions in Arsenal games. Now a big warning because this doesn’t mean that all the bad calls were against Arsenal. No, some calls went our way. The first goal against Bolton and er…er… Is it just my memory letting me down when typing this?

Offside decisions in Arsenal games. You remember how Colina and the guy from the FA said about 98% of the offside decisions being correct? Well in Arsenal games only around 87% are correct. And in this we assume that the ones we could not review are correct.  Well a big difference don’t you think?

So this leaves us with an overall decisions (in which all the little fouls in the middle of the field are included) of some 70% correct decisions. And if we take the weight we gave to some decisions this also leads to a final score of 70% correct decisions from the refs in Arsenal games.

And if we add all those numbers we come up with a total score on average of just under 68% correct decisions in Arsenal games so far this season. Based on 9 games reviewed.

Well I don’t know how you feel about it but I must say that I am shocked by these numbers. I think it is awful. So you can let this sink in a bit and wait for part 2 where we look at the other 29 games we done and take the total 38 games on board.

——————————-

Untold Arsenal – the (fairly) complete index