Referees, Assistants & the consequences of their decisions!

An interesting article on what the impact of poor officiating had over last season in the Premiership.

http://www.sportingintelligence.com...nd-blackpool-were-cheated-last-season-210801/

I raise this subject not to have a bash at referees and assistants; but to highlight what can happen to teams as a consequence of their decisions over a season. It should be added that although only 200 critical decisions were wrong (some might argue that 200 still seems alot) - I suppose there will always be human error, but this article suggests that two teams were relegated and the Gunners missed out on an automatic Champions League spot as a consequence.

This all begs the question - how do we improve on our current system of officiating?

 

Football will always be full of 'what if's' - there are 100s of reasons why teams don't get the results they want, I think it's quite harsh to put all of the blame on officials.

The game is a lot quicker nowadays, that's a fact - it's difficult to get every refereeing decision correct 100% of the time, as you said 'human error' is always going to be there. However, I do strongly believe that video refereeing should be introduced to help officials make the right calls.

 

This is what makes football so exciting and unpredictable. If the referrees made every decision correctly, we'd have nothing to moan about to our mates and would have to talk to our wives more. Leave it be.

 

Agree with both comments; you cannot necessarily blame the officials all the time - especially as many players seem to be acting frequently in a dishonest manner (although they like to call its 'professionalism'). What is concerning however is the impact those decisions have on a club and for us supporters.

Is it okay to say leave it be? When clubs have worked so hard to get into a higher division and over the season find themselves relegated because of decisions made by others were incorrect. I have always thought the over the course of a season, the 'win some loose some' was true. Clearly the evidence suggests that it does not average out over a season and some teams suffer more harshly than others.

Certainly video would help matters - especially if you could as in rugby 'cite' a player for diving or other form of conning the referee to get a player sent off. That would take alot of pressure off the officials because the players would need to conduct themselves with alot more honesty and integrity.

 

Goals change games - you can guarantee that if certain goals had been given or disallowed then the rest of the game that followed the incident would have been totally different. Pretty pointless therefore saying a goal not given in the first half of a 1-2 game would therefore have finished up 2-2.

 

Lies, damn lies and statistics, always good for debate!

If you read the article 713 "incidents" were examined and of those 500 were deemed to have been correctly called by the officials, so over 70% of "incidents" the refs actually got right.

Take into account the fact that many other decisions that the refs got right, might have been "incidents" had they been wrong, but because the ref was right and no "incident" occurred they were therefore excluded from the study, if they were included the officials success rate would soar.

To then extrapolate this to adjust the points tallies of various teams, suggesting Blackpool would have survived and Arsenal finished second is just plain wrong as any one event in the match is contingent upon all previous events. So to suggest that the rest of the match would have proceeded exactly the same and the result should be adjusted by the factor of only the one "incident" is erroneous, unless we are going to start operating in endless parallel universe's and that way lies madness.

Actually for me this indicates that the officials do a good job, I am not arguing against the use of video technology to help the officials but we shouldnt use this data to berate them.

 

Refs make mistakes. But I don't think it's right to say that two clubs were relegated because of referees decisions. The number of mistakes that referees mistakes is negligible compared to the number of mistakes that the players of those teams made.

 

As you write Hudders - always a good subject of debate. The article does not define how it came to review 713 'incidents'; i.e. what criteria was used to determine an 'incident'. If you think about the number of games, the number of minutes played and the decisions referees and assistants are making over the course of a season to be 'wrong' only 200 times (maybe 'wrong' is too stronger term to use). That is quite impressive. Perhaps the key point; accepting that goals change games etc, so its hard to predict what actually would have happened - good ole 'what if' - those decisions could have made the difference to a Premiership club of £90M income... which hardens a case for video reviews. We have them in rudgy, tennis, F1 (a sport more expensive than football)... does this add to the arguement to consider their introduction?