This, I promise you, you will not believe. REFEREE REVIEW 2012: Peter Walton « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

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This article is part of the series : REFEREE REVIEW 2012

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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.

The next in our series is a bit of a special case. He started the season in the PL. And then halfway the season he went to the USA and now he is over there doing a bit what Mike Riley is over here. Leading the refs to glory…. now surely that would be put in the hands of one who was a leading example on the field?

Peter Walton

Let’s find out.

We did 7 games from Walton last season. And that is almost 47% of his total games he has done in the PL. In this case doing half the games should give us a rather good idea on how he was as a ref.

So lets have a look at his numbers.

Well these numbers are….shockingly terribly bad. Only 64% of his decisions were correct on the field. This is awful.

And if we put weight on the decisions it even goes more down to 62.90% correct decisions.

Those numbers are worse than the numbers from Attwell who got demoted. Peter Walton got promoted.

Let us quickly take a look at the different type of decisions he had to make

The goal decisions are rather okay if you compare to the league average. So that is fine.

And also the offside decisions were better than the league average.  So that also is rather fine.

But now we enter the terrible zone. In the others decisions we see a sad score of only 62.62% correct decisions. This is about fouls all over the field. He just didn’t call them as it should have been. And I remind  you on how we did our reviews and that in case of doubt we gave the ref the benefit of the doubt. When no replay was shown he still could have been wrong but we gave it as correct as we couldn’t over rule the decision on the field. Thus this score is really bad and not worthy of the PL.

And then we see his penalty decisions and with 54% correct this is not great and even lower than  the league average so this isn’t good at all.

When we look at the red cards we see that he managed to make 1 correct decision out of 11 possible decisions. Well one is better than none but surely a PL ref should be able to get a better score than that.

And in the yellow card decisions he also managed to get a lower score than the overall league average.

So all in all these are truly bad numbers.

Let us see if we can see if he has a home or away bias.

Well poor teams that had him when away from home. One of the highest negative away biases of all referees against the away teams. Of course the teams that played at home will have been happy with his home-refereeing.

And once again I repeat these are truly shocking numbers. PL unworthy numbers.

And if we put weight on it we see that well… it all stays the same. Terrible home referee is the only conclusion we can reach when we look at these numbers.

Let us move on to the team numbers and see how they pan out.

If we look at these numbers we see that Peter Walton is living in a black and white world.   For the bias is large against you or largely in your favour. I think it just depends on having him in a home game or an away game.  There is no real low bias number to be found in these numbers. Shocking.

And when we put weight on the decisions…. the numbers become even more shocking. Awful is the only word that enters my mind. What can you say about such numbers? It looks as if he had not one game with no controversy in it. Wherever he came he brought bad refereeing with him.

He was either in your favour of heavily against your team. But nowhere can I find any sign of making mistakes nicely split up between the two teams.

If I combine the home and away bias graphics and the team graphics it looks as if this ref was a pure home ref. From the back of my head a few of his games were Everton – Manchester City, Stoke – Manchester – United… games in which he overly gave all to the home teams.

FINAL CONCLUSION

So far when looking at the refs I have never seen such numbers. The competency numbers are shockingly low. Unacceptable low.

Such a bad home bias by this ref exposed time and time again.

Good or bad (the latter for me) but he sure was not a fair ref if we look at these numbers.

So the good news is : WE GOT RID OF HIM! He will not be destroying any more games in the PL this season.  But pity the poor referees in the USA. They now have a person leading them who didn’t have a clue on how to do a good game and on how to be fair and unbiased in his games. Now is he the person that should raise the standard from the referees in the USA. With such a track record?

How does it come that apparently you need to screw up big time as a ref to become a leading person in the referee world after your active career?

A few examples:

• the man of the Busacca-moment was shortly after that event given a big position at Fifa even though he still had a few years as an active ref in front of him and maybe even some finals. He is head of refereeing development. The Mike Riley of Fifa one could say.
• Mike Riley: who made a total mess of the game Manchester United – Arsenal in 2004 and later on got rewarded by being head of the PGMOL and this responsible for the referees in the PL
• And Peter Walton: not being able to do one good game this season (I cannot judge the seasons before) and he is being appointed as head of the referees in the USA.

Is this some kind of trend in the referee world? The worse the ref, the higher the position afterwards… How can we improve the standard of refereeing when the persons responsible for this standard have been crap on many occasions in their own referee career?

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