The Referee for Saturday’s game is Simon Hooper. His assistants are Adrian Holmes, and Simon Long is the Fourth official: Oli Langford. VAR is being run by Michael Salisbury with Steve Meredith as his assistant. (All ref details from [WhoScored](https://www.whoscored.com/Regions/252/Tournaments/2/Seasons/10316/Stages/23400/RefereeStatistics/England-Premier-League-2024-2025)).
Hooper is one of ten referees who have overseen nine games or more this season. 44.4% of his games have been home wins compared with (and here I am only looking at referees who have overseen nine or more league games in this campaign) 14.3% for Anthony Taylor and 60% for Samuel Barrott. An enormous set of variations!
33.33% of his games have been away wins, and 22.2% have been draws. This compares with 64.3% away wins with Anthony Taylor in charge and 66.6% draws when Peter Kavanagh is in control. Again the variation is as ever, utterly enormous and totally bemusing – and never ever, ever, commented upon by the media. But the fact is, once you know the referee you have some indication of what the result might be.
Indeed these refereeing figures reflect the PGMO bias toward home teams which we have so often considered in the past. See for example, [“How referee bias works: the details and the statistics”](https://untold-arsenal.com/archives/104198)
There have been 159 Premier League games this season. 68 (43%) have been home wins, 48 (30%) have been away wins and 43 (27%) have been draws. This again reveals that the home bias, caused as was proven through multiple academic studies upon which we reported at the time, by the effect of the home crowd on the referee; an influence which continues.
And indeed as we can see from the table below, Arsenal’s away form is worse in all measure than the club’s home form – but still considerably better than Palace at home.
3
Arsenal home
8
5
3
0
17
6
11
18
4
Arsenal away
8
3
3
2
12
9
3
12
17
Crystal Palace home
8
1
4
3
6
10
\-4
7
Now we know that Arsenal’s position in the league was affected by a series of very difficult away games early on in the season – away games of the type that we would expect to see spread evenly across the season if there were not some shenanigans going on. But they were not, and clearly there were.
So it is worth having a look at Crystal Palace’s home form this season to see if they too have suffered at the hands of PGMO manipulations of the fixtures list.
With Palace, the first thing we have to note is that this has for them been a season of two halves. In their first eight games, they didn’t have a single victory. In the second eight, they had but one defeat. So let’s focus on the second half of this season thus far.
And although there has only been one defeat (a home game against their most local rivals Fulham) only three of the games have been actual victories. First a 1-0 win over Tottenham, which these days most teams can achieve without too much effort, the second a 0-1 away win over the not very mighty Ipswich Town firmly trapped at the foot of the league, and the last a much more significant away win over Brighton and Hove which followed a 2-2 home draw with Manchester City.
However even the Brighton game could possibly be dismissed as a sign of a Palatial recovery, since Brighton have only won two of their last nine league games. And indeed Manchester City’s draw came in a run for the ManCs in which they have only won one game in 11, in all competitions.
So we might well conclude that Palace have kept the defeats down to one in the last eight league games through the vagaries of the fixture list which has not been pitching them against top teams in form.
But still they have nonetheless won the games scoring 12 goals in these eight games and conceding ten. But their last actual home win in the league was against the failing Tottenham Hotspur back in October. And in their last ten games in all competitions Tottenham have won just three, beating Manchester City about whom one might be able to say (quite literally) they can’t buy a game, although I make no accusation of course – I did say “might”). The others were against Southampton and then the 4-3 win over Manchester United at WHL in the League Cup
So zigzagging through all these tables we can say that the note above to the effect that Palace have only won one game at home in the league this season should bring us some additional hope prior to this match.