Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

By Walter Broeckx

For some of you the waiting on the new reviews might have been too long. Don’t worry it was true for me also. Nothing more frustrating than making reviews that don’t appear on line. But since yesterday afternoon the site Referee Decisions has started publishing new reviews.

At last. Finally. A big sigh of relief from our reviewers, Dogface and myself. Whilst typing this I just paused to put another review on line. Not that you noticed it but just to give you an impression on how eager I (and I suppose the rest also) am to get us back rolling.

I know I have talked about changes to the referee reviews but as I couldn’t show them, it all was a bit abstract. But now they are there and when you cross to the new site and take this one as an example you will see the big difference between the old and the new reviews.

In the old reviews we usually had around 40 decisions to show you. Now a regular review will show around 100 decisions.

The most important reason for this is the fact that we have added all the decisions from the ref in our reviews now. Apart from the toss and the final whistle every moment where a ref or his assistant makes a decision is covered in our review.

You now will see throw in  as a new type of decision. Goal kicks are also new. Those decisions themselves are around at least 50% of the decisions a ref has to make. The downside is that we mostly cannot check them properly. So the ref gets his decision as correct. This is of course an upside for the ref. The reason we cannot check them most of the time is because usually no replays are shown from those decisions. Only when blatantly wrong they will show it. But as you all know this only happens a few times. But we do check them and if we are 100% sure the ref missed it we will of course deduct points from the ref.

By virtually giving the ref a score of 50 to 60% of his decisions as correct we had to change a few things around. And to compensate this we changed the weight of the decisions.  Mistakes by the ref are now more punished in a way.  Making the right decisions is looked upon as natural. But mistakes are more punished.

The result is that when you will look at the final score refs will get in general a higher score on the overall un-weighted decisions. But in the weighted decisions they will get a lower score IF they made a lot of mistakes. It doesn’t have to be that way of course. That is down to the ref and his decisions on the field.

For those who say: but come on  you cannot punish the refs harder on the weight front I can give you an example of how the reviewers work in my country.

In my country the ref has to get an score of 70% in his game. This can be done when he makes just a few small mistakes. When a ref made no real big mistakes he will get at least a score of 75%. At least because when he doesn’t make mistakes that are weighted he will get a higher score.

And now comes the weight points deduction:

When not giving 1 mandatory yellow card: his maximum score can be 72%

When not giving 2 mandatory yellow cards: his maximum score can be 69% (below the border line!!!)

When not giving a red card for 2 yellow cards: his maximum score can be 65%.

When not giving 1 mandatory red card: his maximum score can be 60%.

When not giving 1 mandatory red card as a result of an aggression: his maximum score can be 55%.

When not giving more than 1 mandatory red card or by an arbitration error: his maximum score can be 49%.

So for those saying we are firm or too strict… they are lucky we don’t apply those rules on them. In our review system a not given red card only results in a negative score of -5 points on the total. In my country you could say they take 40% of his points away. Over here we only take about 5% of his possible points away and in most games this will even be lower.

So a big change on our new site.  With lots of data, new data, plus all the old data. And all the old reviews are or will be updated to the new way of presenting the data.

So from now on we will be able to say that Referee Decisions is the most complete referee review site on the whole internet. Well that could change if the PGMOL would open up their files of course but I somehow wonder how one of their reviews look? Are they as  complete as we are?  Do they cover all the decisions like we do?

Maybe the question should be: do they really review the refs completely?  Well if not, then we have filled that gap from now on.

And as I said while all this was going on behind the scenes we have welcomed a few new reviewers.  One supports Liverpool, one supports Southampton and one supports Aston Villa. We hope they stay with us and help us cover all the games.  And it sure is nice to have them around. Here I am hoping for more refs from other teams to join us.

Please join us and become part of the most amazing change in football in the last seasons: an independent outside body to keep an eye on those who are supposed to keep an eye on the game.

For all further information, reviews, good decisions, bad decisions, errors, mistakes, bias,…. only one place to check it all:  Referee Decisions