Are football referees really biased and inconsistent?: evidence on the incidence of disciplinary sanction in the English Premier League

The paper presents a statistical analysis of patterns in the incidence of disciplinary sanction (yellow and red cards) that were taken against players in the English Premier League over the period 1996-2003. Several questions concerning sources of inconsistency and bias in refereeing standards are examined. Evidence is found to support a time consistency hypothesis, that the average incidence of disciplinary sanction is predominantly stable over time. However, a refereeing consistency hypothesis, that the incidence of disciplinary sanction does not vary between referees, is rejected. The tendency for away teams to incur more disciplinary points than home teams cannot be attributed to the home advantage effect on match results and appears to be due to a refereeing bias favouring the home team.

[1]  Luis Garicano,et al.  An Empirical Examination of Multidimensional Effort in Tournaments , 2001 .

[2]  P. Sen.  Asymptotic Properties of Maximum Likelihood Estimators Based on Conditional Specification , 1979 .

[3]  John Goddard,et al.  Regression models for forecasting goals and match results in association football , 2005 .

[4]  D. Karlis,et al.  Analysis of sports data by using bivariate Poisson models , 2003 .

[5]  S. Coles,et al.  Modelling Association Football Scores and Inefficiencies in the Football Betting Market , 1997 .

[6]  John Goddard,et al.  Modelling football match results and the efficiency of fixed-odds betting , 2003 .

[7]  Mark J. Dixon,et al.  The value of statistical forecasts in the UK association football betting market , 2004 .

[8]  G. Ridder,et al.  Down to Ten: Estimating the Effect of a Red Card in Soccer , 1994 .

[9]  Robert Simmons,et al.  Odds setters as forecasters: the case of English football , 2005 .

[10]  And a Hockey Game Broke Out: Crime and Punishment in the NHL , 2003 .

[11]  James J. Heckman,et al.  The x[superscript]2 Goodness of Fit Statistic for Models with Parameters Estimated from Microdata , 1984 .

[12]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Favoritism of Agents - the Case of Referees' Home Bias , 2002 .

[13]  Ignacio Palacios-Huerta,et al.  Favoritism Under Social Pressure , 2001, Review of Economics and Statistics.

[14]  D. Andrews.  Testing When a Parameter Is on the Boundary of the Maintained Hypothesis , 2001 .

[15]  R. Tollison,et al.  Crime on the Court , 1984, Journal of Political Economy.

[16]  A. Mark Williams,et al.  The influence of crowd noise and experience upon refereeing decisions in football , 2002 .

[17]  Robert Witt.  Do Players React to Sanction Changes? Evidence from the English Premier League , 2005 .

[18]  Benno Torgler,et al.  The Economics of the FIFA Football Worldcup , 2004 .

[19]  K. Liang,et al.  Asymptotic Properties of Maximum Likelihood Estimators and Likelihood Ratio Tests under Nonstandard Conditions , 1987 .

[20]  David Law,et al.  The Favourite-Longshot Bias and Market Efficiency in UK Football Betting , 2000 .

[21]  John Goddard,et al.  Forecasting football results and the efficiency of fixed‐odds betting , 2004 .

[22]  M. Maher.  Modelling association football scores , 1982 .

[23]  S. Kocherlakota,et al.  Bivariate discrete distributions , 1992 .

[24]  G. Oehlert.  A note on the delta method , 1992 .

[25]  Stephen Dobson,et al.  The Economics of Football , 2001 .