Every set of fans in the country think their club is hard done to by the officials. Every single one. A few of those fanbases even have songs about it. Every forum I know of has this kind of thread concentrating on everything that goes wrong against them.
Most of these fans just select half a dozen examples, from the 250 decisions refs make in every game, and only look at what they think has gone against them and rarely if ever looking at what the ref’s got wrong in their team’s favour or all the things the ref’s got right… all just done to cement their confirmation biases.
Analysis on wrong decisions was done about five years ago and they found that 98% of all decisions made by refs are correct. It was done again last season and it found a similar figure of 96% correct. On average they get 5 decisions wrong a game. It happens, they’re human.
Last season they also looked at VAR and who got the rough and the smooth. It showed that Liverpool got the most number of wrong decisions go against them, yet you’d listen to City, Everton and United fans’ opinions on refs and they’d all tell you that Liverpool are favoured compared to everyone else.
Like you say, yesterday Ipswich should have had a penalty, also Lewis dived three times and wasn’t booked for any of them. Those are the sort of things Ipswich fans will pick up on while also ignoring other things that went on in their favour because their fanbase is the same as our fanbase who do the same, because all fanbases do it.
Over the years, Fulham fans have the hump about City getting all the decisions go our way: from the Sterling joke of a penalty, de Bruyne’s joke of a penalty that won us the game in injury time, Aké’s goal when Akanji was offside… but I bet if you analyse all decisions between the two teams, it won’t be as one-sided as Fulham fans think.
Are you able to provide links to the analysis of officiating and VAR that you are referring to?
I am aware of PGMOL’s analysis of its own officiating and VAR outcomes that found very high rates of correct decisions, and have spoken—as a data scientist with two decades in financial analytics, economic analysis, and statistical fraud detection and prevention—to why that shouldn’t be used to form any real conclusions, given the source of the analysis.
PGMOL will always find a body of evidence that their officials get the vast majority of decisions correct, and the way in which they defined the analysis universe was highly problematic, as is often the case with attempting to create quantitative analysis of qualitative (subjective) assessments. This is without getting in to the flaws of how the actual decisions are recorded and assessed (many decisions aren’t actually represented in the data because the officials decided
not to act in a particular moment, and thus do not should up at all in officiating analysis).
Interestingly enough, prior to the introduction of VAR, PGMOL claimed that officials got 98% of decisions correct. Then, after VAR was implemented, they claimed that it had significantly improved the rate of correct decisions compared to pre-VAR seasons, which would, of course, be statistically highly improbable (bordering impossible), even ignoring our ability to analyse officiating and see there is not now a greater than 98% correct decision rate. 98% itself is highly improbable given humans are making the decisions in real time (a 98% rate would make PL match officials the single most accurate group of human beings on the planet).
I am also aware of the Sky Sports and ESPN VAR analyses that are widely accepted as quite dubious by football fans that also happen to have some statistical expertise and understanding of the methodology being used.
I am genuinely curious to dig in to the analyses you have read.
Regarding Lewis diving three times, I don’t recall that happening. Could you provide the minutes in which you believe he dived? I would like to watch those passages to get a sense if I missed it.
As far as statistics that could help support that the referee may not have been balanced in his officiating, I think the basic possession, fouls, and cards count is helpful in providing some context (of course, it still is plagued by the aforementioned issue of non-decisions not being captured and multiple fouls in a single sequence not being fully reflected).
Ipswich: 24% possession, 15 fouls, 3 yellows
City: 76% possession, 4 fouls, 2 yellows
It tells a story, even without noting that he let a fair few challenges from Ipswich players go that probably should have been given as fouls, including the early pull back on Haaland that should have been a penalty, and only gave one foul (no card) for a 5 second sequence that saw Delap elbow Akanji’s throat, swing his arm around to forearm Manu’s chest to finish the job, and then go studs up in to Gvardiol’s shin, just below his knee. And that was only three of about 8 very questionable challenges Delap put in on our players before he was subbed off without a yellow. Also worth noting Dias got booked for putting his arm across a player (his first foul) literally seconds after one of theirs did it and merely got a foul, and Grealish got booked for being fouled in the Ipswich box.
I personally think—having more time to ruminate on his overall performance—that he was drafted in unready (due to the injury to the initial referee in the warm up), the occasion was too much for him, and he leaned too far in to the well-known “home team officiating effect” (which sees officials often be more lenient on away teams to avoid the appearance of favouritism to the home team) rather than any conspiracies.
