You read the stats with rags games, in a lot of them the ref will book the other teams defenders early, almost putting them on the back foot early on.
Graham Poll said something in his book along the lines of he used to get an email telling him how to ref the match at the rags in favour of them as they didn't want to upset taggart.
I'm 99.9% sure he mentions it in his book, will have to look for a link for it.
Edit..
Found this.
As a Leeds United fan, the twenty year period between the start of the Premier League era and the departure from Man U of Alex Ferguson was for me a two-decades long spell of misery and disillusion…
roblufc.org