Manchester U v Arsenal: the mighty haven't just fallen, they've disintegrated
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By Bulldog Drummond
The referee for the game away to Manchester United is Anthony Taylor. So far he has overseen 24 games this season – more than any other referee. One may ask why does he get so many games while other referees are left on the sidelines, hardly getting a match.
But that is how it is so these are the figures we analyse. And we find Tayloris mid-range for fouls per game .
Games Fouls pg Pen pg Yel pg
Anthony Taylor 24 21.00 0.38
Michael Oliver 21 23.24 0.10
Peter Bankes 17 19.35 0.29
Darren England 13 23.69 0.15
John Brooks 12 22.92 0.17
Variance* 22% 380%
*The variance figures are the difference between the least and most active referee in each case, and these are yet again truly shocking.
For while the referee who sees the most fouls per game out of our selection of five active referees this season, is just 22%, which given the nature of the game I would say is acceptable, the difference between referees in terms of the number of penalties they give is 380%.
In other words, for every penalty Michael Oliver gives, Anthony Taylor gives almost four. Have Taylor as your referee, and you might as well forget about tackling in the penalty area.
With yellow cards, the difference is still horrific, although not quite as insane. Have Brooks as your referee for a match and you will be getting on for double the number of yellow cards as you would have with Anthony Taylor.
As ever, I have to point out that this is nothing to do with the clubs and their gameplan – this is just what the referees do. There is no consistency between one referee and another. So if Arsenal want to play this referee’s game, the answer is to put in the tackles anywhere on the pitch except in the penalty area.
The matter gets even crazier with the results that referees see. If they were all acting in similar ways their figures for home and away wins ought to be similar, but they are anything but.
Just look at these variations. Figures as ever from WhoScored.
Referee Games HomeWin% AwayWin% Draw%
Anthony Taylor 24 20.8 58.3 20.8
Peter Bankes 17 58.8 35.3 5.9
Chris Kavanagh 17 11.8 23.5 64.7
Darren England 13 30.8 53.8 15.4
John Brooks 12 75.0 16.7 8.3
Darren Bond 11 72.7 9.1 18.2
Tim Robinson 10 20.0 30.0 50.0
Variation 51.9% 49.2% 58.5%
Now the fact is that these figures work in Arsenal’s favour for this game. This ref is a top man for away wins, seeing around 50% more away wins than Darren Bond. If Manchester United take any note of these things (and I would be amazed if they didn’t, since which referee you have does have a major impact on the results) they must be cursing. They undoubtedly wanted Darren Bond.
But just look at that bottom row, which shows the difference between the referee most likely to oversee this result and the referee least likely to.
To be clear, these figures say nothing about the current obsession with which referee favours which team – they show that referees see games in utterly different ways, and that which referee you get plays a major part in determining the result of a match.
Now of course, the media will have nothing to do with this. They constantly run the story, using the words of the Athletic this week that “Fans of pretty much every single club seem to claim the league and match officials have an agenda against them and are corrupt. This effectively proves the leagues have an agenda against nobody and match officials are not corrupt. Such nonsense needs to stop! As do people claiming reporters like me are “on the payroll” for simply speaking the truth. You may not like or agree with it, which is fine, but cut the rubbish.”
But the rubbish is that article. Just because some fans have odd opinions about this or that referee being biased against their club, and just because this is clearly nonsense since not every club can be biased against, that does not mean that nothing untoward is going on. Yet this is the story that the media are running day after day. Because Klopp said he didn’t like Tierney does not mean that Tierney was biased against Liverpool. Indeed he actually said so. Beacuse Thomas Tuchel strongly criticised referee Anthony Taylor that doesn’t mean to say Taylor is biased.
However, the figures we produce showing that some referees are much more likely to oversee home wins and others are much more likely to oversee away wins, are the figures which do show that something is wrong.
By running the “this ref is against my club” story over and over again, and then denouncing it, the media makes it look as if only stupid fans think there is anything wrong. But the media is laughing at us, not because of that story, but because they are so successfully stopping anyone looking at the real story – that some referees give lots of home wins and some lots of away wins.
Why this happens we have known since the days of the pandemic when the research was done by senior academics working with professional referees. But of course that is serious academic research and no one is interested in that. Let’s make fun of the stupid fans instead. Indeed, you can hear editors calling out, “Does anyone have a stupid fan story – we haven’t got one today.”
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Manchester U v Arsenal: the mighty haven't just fallen, they've disintegrated
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