New Season, Same SFA Generated Risks
I have had it confirmed this morning that the Yorkshire Whistler has agreed to adjudicate on contentious major decisions affecting SPFL matches for the 2023-24 season.
My thanks to him for his time, patience, and ability to explain using language a golden retriever would understand, the nuances of the laws of football and their application.
The Honest Mistakes series has been running for two seasons now.
It remains vital in my view as the standard of part-time Scottish refereeing continues to fall behind the needs of modern professional football where tens of millions of pounds are at stake in qualification for European football.
So long as referees remain unvetted for club loyalties, and have economic, beneficial, or familial ties to clubs, and the SFA refuse steadfastly to address transparency, then doubt will remain amongst many supporters as to their competence and, sadly, partiality.
The risks associated with the presence of doubt have never been starker than this upcoming season.
The 2023-24 SPFL champions will get direct entry into a revamped Champions League with a guaranteed eight fixtures instead of six. It is expected the financial rewards will be even greater than current estimates of a £25m revenue boost.
It is furthermore expected that this seasons SPFL title chase will be a tight two horse race primarily although what a breath of fresh air it would be if one of the other clubs could organise and invest sensibly to compete. Indeed, despite UEFA Financial Fair Play Watch List scrutiny, Celtic’s main rivals are going “all in” as regards incoming recruitment.
Refereeing outcomes will continue to be key, therefore.
What have we learned so far over a sample of 76 game weeks?
Referrals
In 2021-22 the Yorkshire Whistler was referred 107 major calls. He judged 34 of them to have been judged incorrectly at the time – an astonishing fail rate of 32%.
Last season?
Less calls were referred – and with the mid-season rushed introduction of Virtual Assistant Referee (VAR) that is to be expected, but 20 were deemed incorrect out of 83 – 24%.
An improvement but, given the context of VAR, that is still an astonishingly high error rate.
When VAR was introduced, we were told that correct decisions would move from around 95% to 97%+.
Seen in that context, the performance of Scottish referees is very poor overall.
Cui Bono?
My starting hypothesis all along is that incompetence has no pattern and that errors by referees should “penalise” all teams equally over a large enough sample.
The framework to evaluate this is to consider whether a decision is correct or not. Then look at the game state at the time of the decision (time of match and score, and whom is home or away), then use Expected Points to estimate the impact of the decision on each time as regards whether the impact of that decision takes them closer or further away from three points.
For 2021-22, the final position as regards the impact of the decisions on the top two was as follows:
This means that Celtic are estimated to have received 2.38 LESS points over the season that expected due to refereeing errors, whilst main challengers The Rangers received 1.47 MORE.
A net swing of 3.85 expected points.
Given the context of a tight two-way title race, nearly four points could be significant. Fortunately, Ange Postecoglou’s side got over the line regardless.
Last season the final reckoning was:
This time there was a whopping 7.91 swing of expected points in favour of the Ibrox outfit over the season. Again, making the title race far closer than had the correct decisions been made. Whilst VAR was in operation.
Summary
Over two full seasons of independent refereeing assessment of SPFL matches involving the top two title contenders, errors from referees are consistently above 20% of all major calls referred.
In that period, where there has been Champions League direct group stage qualification at stake, The Rangers have benefitted by 11.76 expected points over their rivals in terms of the outcome of those mistakes.
Most concerning is that the discrepancy of errors in favour of The Rangers is INCREASING despite the introduction of VAR.
Indeed, there were three big and very strange calls referred last season that call into question how the VAR process is being managed by this group of referees.
In November 2022, Jota had a goal disallowed at Motherwell in extraordinary circumstances, with VAR David Dickinson seemingly ignoring all protocols to penalise Celtic. You can read the detail here.
In January 2023, although the Yorkshire Whistler reviews SPFL matches, such was the unusual nature of the League Cup Semi Final decision making, there was a special review. The non-decisions to not send off Borna Barisic and Ryan Kent were in a knife-edge cup tie that went to extra time. It seems that the Barisic incident was simply not reviewed. More bizarrely, we were told that VAR was inoperable during the Kent elbow to the head of Liam Scales.
The Yorkshire Whistler found this “quite astonishing”.
Finally, again back to Fir Park Motherwell for the March clash involving the Steelmen and The Rangers. In the 62nd minute with the game poised at 2-2, the away side score through Todd Cantwell despite VAR review of what appeared to be a clear offside. The image released subsequently seemed not to have correctly aligned lines. The Yorkshire Whistler opined “I am inclined to feel this image does not feel quite right” in his review here.
Three very odd decisions handled in a way baffling to a fellow professional referee.
A small sample, but the consistent theme – the arrived at decisions benefitted The Rangers in all cases.
Despite the introduction of VAR, there is evidence of tampering with agreed documented procedures and questionable implementation of the technology.
Throughout all of this, with Champions League money rising to increase the stakes, the outworking of the decision making by SFA officials seems to consistently, over two seasons, favour one team.
Hence it is imperative the Yorkshire Whistler continues his impartial and much appreciated work.