Good morning folks. I ran a small survey on twitter yesterday about the average fan’s perception of the Premier League referees, of the offside law as applied in the Premier League, and the use of a Video Assistant Referee (VAR).
The survey received 90 responses with 88 of them self-identifying as Arsenal supporters, 1 as Chelsea, and 1 as Barcelona. I put the link to the survey on twitter and received 13,553 impressions and 208 engagements with a mere 8 RTs.
When asked how they felt about the standard of Premier League refereeing with a 1 representing “Very poor, get a lot of decisions wrong” and 5 “very good, get most decisions right”, 68% chose number 1 (32%) or 2 (36%). Only one respondent chose 5 (very good, get most decisions right).
When asked how they feel about the standards of refereeing in other leagues and in the Champions League, the results were largely neutral to good.
With Champions League refereeing seen as almost entirely pretty positive:
I received two comments (on twitter) from folks who only watch Premier League matches – they both said that they selected 3 for the standards of refereeing in other leagues.
I then asked about the integrity of the officials with just three options: mostly fair, biased, or corrupt. Only 30% said that they are mostly fair, 47% said that they were biased, and an incredible 23% feel that the Premier League referees are corrupt.
I then asked who they felt the referees were biased toward/against and gave them five options: just one club consistently, a few clubs in a geographic region (the old “southern softies” idea), little to no bias, or an option that the bias seems to shift from team to team over the years. 49% of the respondents chose a shifting bias.
Shifting to VAR I asked folks to self-identify whether they were in favor of VAR or not before it’s implementation. 70% said that they were in favor, 7% against, and 23% uncertain.
When asked if VAR has been a success on a scale of 1-5 with 1 indicating disappointment and 5 indicating success, 60% of respondents chose 1 and 92% chose 1 or 2.
Those numbers shifted slightly when asked how much VAR helps officials get the calls right. In this scale, 1 indicates “it doesn’t help much” and 5 “it helps a lot”. The majority still feel that it isn’t that helpful but at least 37% feel like it helps some or more.
But when asked if VAR has made refereeing more fair the scale slipped back again.
When asked what the one big problem with VAR is the group overwhelmingly chose “the decisions are still bad”. This was a surprise because I expected the time it takes to make the decisions to be the majority since it is the main single complaint I hear from fans.
And from here we move to asking about the offside law. First I asked how fans felt about the offside law before VAR and they were largely neutral to positive. 1 indicates “they got a lot of calls wrong” and 5 indicates “it got almost every call right”.
Then I asked about VAR and the offside law with the exact same likert scale above:
Fans are split on this topic with the middle ground almost entirely erased and distributed to either extreme of the scale. Fans who answered 2 or 4 stayed roughly the same but the number of fans who now feel like the referees get nearly every call right jumped from 4 to 17 and the number of fans who think that refs get nearly every call wrong went from 8 to 16.
When asked how they would change the laws of the game fans had a lot of suggestions, most of them around the offside law (not surprising). 89% of the respondents don’t like the laws of the game as they are implemented with handball and offside the two main culprits.
The main suggestion from fans is to revert the offside law back to the domain of the sideline official and then only use VAR for clear and obvious errors.
Conclusions:
Given the limited group of respondents, this survey only shows the feelings of a small group of Arsenal fans. Further, it would be difficult to extrapolate out that “all Arsenal fans” feel so intensely negative about the referees because respondents were self-selecting. Many fans saw the survey, quite a few interacted with it, but only a few chose to take it. The ones who did so might be self-selected to be highly critical of the referees.
However, anecdotal evidence suggests that these survey results, while slightly surprisingly negative, don’t seem too far off what this author has witnessed in the comments section of this blog, on twitter (especially), and in personal interactions with other fans. Premier League football fans do seem to have an intense mistrust of the officials – in my experience. That mistrust is fueled by social media, blogs, podcasts, journalists, and the broadcasters in my opinion.
For more reliable data a similar survey should be done across a wide range of fans from a variety of leagues. In addition, a survey of where fans get their news or engage with other fans would be helpful in teasing out the source of mistrust (if it really exists).
One of the more surprising results is the idea that nearly half of the fans believe that Premier League referees have a shifting bias: choosing one team to favor one year and another another year. This result could indicate that fans understand that the idea of a consistent bias or corruption isn’t merited by the evidence – one team isn’t the recipient of all the calls and no one team is constantly getting the bad calls (though 20% do believe that). Something which might explain this result is “motivated reasoning“. That is a phenomenon which occurs when people who have a motivation for finding a specific conclusion then find reasons to reach that conclusion despite the evidence. In this case, the motivation is that they believe the referees are biased against their club but without clear evidence of that bias they then reason that the referees must be shifting their biases from year to year. However, if referees are shifting their biases, is that even really bias? And why would they be doing that?
The results also suggest that VAR and the offside law are polarizing. Fans either think it helps refs get calls correct or is making the refs get calls incorrect. There is almost no middle ground. The problem seems to lie in the false accuracy of the lines. Fans have long known that which frame the VA referees use can make as much difference to offside as where the player’s toe is. Which is exacerbated by choosing the correct frame for when the ball is passed.
Where there does seem to be middle ground is to revert the rule to allow the sideline officials to make the calls and then only use VAR for egregiously bad calls. As someone who watches a lot of football from around Europe, this seems to be the method preferred in most other leagues.
TL;DR 🙂
Basically you are saying the people have spoken: (1) VAR suks arse, (2) the offside rule is clear as mud, and (3) Mike Dean should be subjected to cat o’ nine tails daily…just because.
Right? RIGHT?
my gripe with var is twofold. first, it should be used to assist the referee, not re-referee the game. i have no problem giving an official a different angle to confirm he saw what he thought he saw. it’s the same for letting him see something he missed. the replay decisions should be based on the full-speed replay with the slo-mo only as confirmation. the game isn’t played in slow-mo so an overall call shouldn’t be based primarily on the slow-mo replay either.
second, the offsides. those lines in england are ridiculous. the laws of the game used to say that even was onsides. we should retain that. if you have to put those silly lines up to determine if a player is offsides, he should be ruled onside, full stop. a player doesn’t have the ability to put those silly little lines up. neither does the assistant referee. if it’s that close, the call should favor the attacking player. anything more is “over-refereeing” and that’s not what var is for.
It’s not going to improve VAR necessarily but I am thinking more often about the entire offside rule these days. I know this topic waxes and wanes but the more I think about opening up the pitch, I think offenses and defenses will adjust pretty quickly. Less interruption of the game, less involvement from officials,
For those who know their hockey, yes, the NHL still has offside but the game opened up tremendously after the elimination of the two line pass rule. No more neutral zone trap, no more boring, low scoring affairs.
i don’t think i agree with you, brother. a hockey rink is much smaller than a football pitch. while you might have more goals, i think the game would be too stretched, meaning a lot less organized and more boring; strategy be damned.
i think allowing a player to be level with the second to last opposition player is the best the rule could be. i’d hate to see the game regress into some idiot standing in a forward position all game, waiting to poach a goal.
Field hockey got rid of the rule and it has a pitch as big as a football pitch. It works fine, makes the field bigger. It creates more running, there is more space between lines but not so much so. You’d be surprised!
Dude, CR7 does that all day! NBA-like 3 second violation? Stand too long in the area and the other side gets the ball or a free kick. Good point, though. How about World Peace?
VAR as a technology is perfectly fine. However the humans i.e. referees aren’t.
It was brought in to help the referees but it only exacerbate and exposed their incompetence.
Here is the latest in a litany of gaffs by the EPL refs!
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11685/12288749/fabian-balbuena-west-ham-defenders-red-card-against-chelsea-overturned-on-appeal
i saw that play. it was an awful call. the bad thing is that it was var who made the call and the referee agreed with the call.
I don’t have too much of an issue with the refs. They are humans, make mistakes. I would find it really hard to believe any have a particular bias against Arsenal.
The handball VAR on the other end of things, was ridiculous early in the year. Accidental handballs with arms in fairly natural positions were being called when the ball was kicked from only a yard or two away. But that seems to have gotten a little better, as if there was actually direction to the refs to modify things.
The offsides assumes both a level of precision that is not actually present(i.e. knowing the exact moment of the ball being kicked is necessary if you’re going to call it to the inch). It also goes away from the idea of the rule being there to prevent the attacker from gaining a significant advantage. If it’s marginal and 5 passes earlier, that’s probably not the case.
Get ride of the offside rule, I’m saying. It will really open up the game, reduce having to go to VAR and make the game even more exciting. But I’m sure we’ll have World Peace before offside goes away.
Self-selection seems likely to elicit highly negative responses on a charged topic such as VAR. With all the ‘surveys’ that hit my inbox from past purchases of goods or services– I’m only inclined to participate in those I felt surpassed expectations– or failed utterly.
On VAR? It’s not the tech I’m inclined to be dissatisfied with. It’s the (same) PL referees I distrust with the whistle. When the VAR operator gets a decision ‘right’– do I give praise or feel relief? Nine times out of 10 it’s relief. With the PL VARs, it seems there’s been a dedicated effort to use the slimmest of margins to overturn a call. ‘Clear and obvious’ seems way down the list of criteria observed.
Occurs that the technology is being applied in so fine a manner– in order to be rid of it. Is that the goal of PGMOL? Can only shrug as an answer. How it’s being applied can’t be chalked up to ‘growing pains’ or a ‘learning curve’. Some fool designed that nefarious video axis-and-crosshair system in advance of the initial implementation. That’s the criminal aspect in PL VAR application.
But then– it does seem to work as intended, in most every other league and tournament competition. Maybe VAR can be refined for better application in the PL. If the system isn’t thrown out at the first opportunity.
Personally I think they should rethink the way VAR is applied and adopt a similar model to how it works in Cricket. In Cricket the onus is on the team captain to request the review of a decision. They have a limited number of “reviews” and if they ask for one and the original decision stands they lose one (if they are correct they retain the review). This system would take some pressure off the refs to look at every single call and would improve the flow of the game. It would also capture and rectify the big errors as intended. Another thing they use in cricket which would be useful particularly for things like offside is where the technology cannot be certain they rely on the umpires original call. They use hawkeye ball tracking to check for certain types of dismissal, however this is not always 100% accurate so in situations where there is doubt they refer back to the original call from the umpire. This could be effective in situations such as Pepe v Everton where the offside call is extremely marginal (just go with the linos original decision)
Great post Tim.
I have been following an Arsenal blog and the comments since about 2005 and its amazing how desperately our fans want to believe the referee bias/conspiracy theories. The fires were fanned by the media and blogs with an agenda especially untold Arsenal. When you have an agenda and you look for something hard enough you will eventually find evidence to support your belief. In our case, fans remember forever and make long lists of calls that went against us but they ignore and then quickly forget any calls that go our way. I have always called it confirmation bias but your term motivational reasoning is probably a more accurate descriptive term.
There has to be a motive for any long running action but I can’t think of any possible motive for the entire ref fraternity to maintain a long running anti-Arsenal bias. I find the conspiracy and corruption theories even more unbelievable. To organize a long running illegal conspiracy that could potentially send the conspirators to jail there has to be a very strong motivation and lot of money involved and who would be paying the league or the refs to target Arsenal? What could the money people be gaining by specifically target Arsenal? There would have to be dozens and dozens of refs and the league administration and their assistants involved and a long running email, paper and money trial and how do keep something like that secret? Just one relatively low paid administrative assistant who wanted to make a ton of money could blow it all apart by selling the story to press.
Anyone who has been married for a while probably knows about bias confirmation/ motivational reasoning. In my case, my wonderful wife truly believed I spent a lot more time on electronic devices then she did and every time she saw me on a device it confirmed her bias that I was addicted and wasting an inordinate amount of time managing my fantasy football team and commenting on an Arsenal blog. Finally I compared the actual screen time on our phones and iPads for a couple months and proved that she spent a lot more time on the devices then I did. There is large segment of Arsenal fans have the same type of motivational reasoning when it comes to the ref bias/conspiracy theories.
So, Bill, was that endeavor a Pyrrhic Victory? 😉
I don’t have the stones to try that with my wonderful wife…
Referee biasa paper written by Thomas Dohmenand Jan Sauermann published Feb 2015
I don’t know if there’s a better analysis out there? We’ve had the most referee decisions over-turned (might go some way towards explaining fan frustration).
Would b nice to see a more qualitative assessment based on game state.
https://www.espn.co.uk/football/english-premier-league/story/4182135/how-var-decisions-affected-every-premier-league-club-in-2020-21
Meant to say most referee decisions over turned by the VAR not in our favour.
MattB The fact that we had a lot of decisions turned over against us could mean that the refs were initially making more wrong calls in our favor but those bad decisions didn’t stand up to review when they were looked at on VAR.
LoneStar. It was not a big issue and she quickly forgot the episode since there was clear cut objective evidence that her subjective impression was off base. I am sure she does not even remember. I remember only because the bias confirmation it was analogous to Arsenal fans with regard to the ref bias debates. They believe every bad call that goes against us confirms their subjective belief and they quickly forget any calls that go in our favor.