Help with the review of referee decisions in EPL

The website refereedecisions.co.uk is looking for qualified referees who help them review the referees of the Premier League. “This may seem like an unusual appeal but I hope you could hear me out”, says Stuart Higgins, one of the men behind the initiative. “We would really appreciate your help.”

Here’s how you could participate in the review of referee decisions:

We are appealing for help with a referee review campaign where a team of qualified referees have been reviewing the performance of English Premier League Referees and scoring them on key competences.

This campaign was started to see if the claim by many commentators that ‘bad / incorrect decisions all even out in the end’ is in fact true. It is also to establish any trends which could suggest bias or incompetence. This season just gone, we managed to review 155 (40%) games but we’d like to make that 100% with your help. Reviewers have full advantage of pause, slow motion and replays. =

Mike Riley, head of referees for the EPL, claims that 99% of offside decisions are correct. Our reviews established that the actual figure is closer to 91%. Additionally, based on the reviews we carried out, over 78% of red card decisions as well as over 37% of Penalty Decisions and over 43% of yellow card decisions in EPL games last season were incorrect! These figures are absolutely staggering!

Scoring incidents
Over the course of the season, our refs have watched games for all teams in the Premier League and scored the ref on each incident assessing four main factors. Decisions could be one of the following:

• Awarded correctly
• Awarded incorrectly
• Correctly not awarded
• Incorrectly not awarded

Another factor also considered was the type of decision and the effect (weight) it had on the game. For example, the ref not awarding a penalty carries far more weight than the ref awarding a throw in to the wrong team in the middle of the park.

Format of reviewing
The format used to review the refs is an open source data base. You can see minute by minute assessments and any part of the reviews can be challenged by readers. In cases of doubt, we re-look at the data and modify our decision if need be.

If a decision cannot be confirmed from TV footage as right or wrong, we give the ref the benefit of the doubt so you could say our data is on the conservative side.

So if you are a qualified referee, we are asking for your help. We have referees from several countries who have dedicated some spare time to reviewing games and producing a score sheet using our standard template.

More information on how to get involved and a link to the summary findings can be found here :

– The ref appeal
– The reviews