Football referee stats – useful for betting

Football Leagues and Stats

This is the time of the year when we happen upon what I call the limbo season.
Each team had only a handful of games to play. However only a minority of teams has anything to play for. League Title, top four place. Or the need to avoid relegation. So in reality probably half of all the sides in each league find themselves in this position.
What does it mean in reality. Well as there is little or nothing to play for, other than points, what can we expect to gain from such matches?
I find this is the time to take a close look at "bookings".
This is normally a bet for the "spreaders". However there are bookmakers who issue the necessary "book" for this market.
With little to play for players tend, whether by design or not, to take things a little easier than normal. Why flog a dead horse, comes to mind?
Now we know some referees are a little slow in pulling out the "cards". If we can find one of these refs in the middle for the game between two of our "limbo" teams we can be sure that we’ll be in with a chance in the cards market.

Some referee stats.
              matches   Yellows   average per game   Red   Total Card Average
P. Walton        22        54           2.50          4          2.68
C.Foy.           25        66           2.64          2          2.72
M.Clattenberg    28        76           2.71          5          2.89
K.Friend         12        34           2.83          4          3.16
L.Mason          19        54           2.84          4          3.05
P. Dowd.         26        75           2.88          4          3.03

This is just a quick guide to the Premiership referees.
The more you dig, the better you’ll be armed. Also you’ll know which referees to avoid.
Andre Marriner, Mike Dean and Martin Atkinson , come to mind. In fact anyone with an average above FOUR should be avoided.
The same can be found for all referees  in all leagues.
Our own Championship throws up some interesting figures.
A much larger number of referees officiate in this league. So averages are over  as maller number of games.
What I did find of interest, was, Premiership referees, on duty in the Championship, mostly, return a much higher average figure for "Cards". Although their appearances at such games are few and far between.
Does this difference indicate the the Championship is a "harder"  competition?  Who knows.
Checking the Big Four Associations along these lines I found Germany to be very similar to our Premiership with their referee returns.
France too are quite close to us with their stats. Yellows average from 2.77 to 4.75 with just a single ref issueing 5 in his only game. These figures are worth taking at face value as the French League have a small number of officials running their top league games. Fifteen have taken all bar FOUR games so far
La Liga have as expected a much higher average than we’ve seen so far. Ranging from 4.22 to 6.50.
Serie A have similar high scores. Their roll call has 26 referees officiating so far this season. The 18 who have run more than 4 games each have averages ranging from 3.57 to 6.00.
It does look as if the South European leagues are tougher or a the refs just that bit stricter.
I do know that some of heir decisions are very strange tho’.