Well yes, but we know that certain factors affect referees. We know for example that referees will give different decisions if watching a video with the sound on and the sound off, suggesting that the fans have a clear impact. It also wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility that the media reaction to decisions also subconsciously influences their decisions. Andre Marriner was unsure about the handball the other day. Which of the following scenarios do you think he would have got more media criticism for? Not giving a penalty for Man City when it was one, or giving a penalty against Arsenal when it wasn't one? I can guarantee that we never would have heard the end of it from the London media if he'd given an undeserved penalty for us. Do you not think the media witch hunt against Raheem Sterling might have contributed to how the referees treat him when he goes down for a penalty? And do you not think that the media treatment of our club in general, and the insinuation that we don't deserve to be where we are, might an affect on how we are refereed? None of it is conscious, and yet it can all have an impact in those big 50/50 decisions in a close match. We saw how in the Barcelona comeback against PSG, the referee was obviously caught up in the story and the occasion and failed to see what was pretty obvious cheating to get themselves the required goals.I think most of this is silly paranoia most of the time with all sorts of crank observations about how we're badly done to. But jeeez it has been suspicious how many bad results we are getting because of refs.
Anyone who thinks there is a concerted effort against us with secret meetings, money exhcanging hands, owners and refs getting together to decide who wins and who doesnt... Is probably a barmpot
Who's doing that in the Premier League then? Because whoever they are, they're doing a pretty shit job of it. This is a bit different, because it's suggesting that there's a conspiracy against one club, not in favour of one. And obviously there's definitely a conspiracy on the part of the big clubs to protect their incomes, but they don't need cheating to do that, they just rewrite the rules in their favour, as we've seen multiple times over the past 30 years.So Juve didn't manage to do exactly that for years to help win multiple league and cups...
A colleague of mine wrote about match fixing in sumo wrestling http://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/general/not-pushing-their-weight-corruption-in-sumo/ I know it's not obviously related but there is beginning to be more research into fixed games by academics. They can't prove anything but by using probability and patterns of behaviour, such as how many penalties give by a named ref to a particular team compared to the average, they can point to the suggestion that something isn't quite right.
None of us have enough stats, but wouldn't it be great if we could plot every incident in a game, link it to the competing teams and the referee to see if patterns emerge which are not consistent with averages? Sky could probably do this now, but probably wouldn't want to compromise the competition. No referee or footballer is likely to say he took part in a fix of any kind, but we know it's happened in the past. We also can work out whether some refs give more to certain teams than others. At the moment we all have a feeling that something's not right, perhaps it's time to gather the stats, use probability theory and comparisons?
Can anyone give me a video for the not allowed penalties for City in the matchs of Chelsea _ esp.Navas penalty _ and Everton in Goodison Park on Sterling ??