Referee Errors Hurting Big Clubs, Or: Math Can’t Be Wrong

By: Martha | October 16th, 2007

I don’t know what this means. An organization called Observatory on the Referee Mistakes in Football (That’s the Milan website’s translation of its name; I’m sure it sounds a lot better in Italian.), run by a couple of independent organizations, has published its first study of how human error has so far affected Serie A results this season, and there are a lot of surprises in their findings.

From what I can tell, the study was based on 39 specific incidents in which, according to the three major Italian sports newspapers, referee errors either led directly to goals, or caused good goals to be disallowed. Now, it’s clearly impossible to decide for sure how a game would have turned out if, say, X goal would have been allowed to stand, because different scores would lead to tactical changes, different substitution patters, etc., and I’m going to assume that’s mentioned somewhere in the study. (Hopefully.) That said, though, based on those 39 errors, it was determined that 43% of all matches so far have been changed by referee mistakes (last year it was “only” 41%), and 48 points were either awarded to the wrong teams or taken away from those who actually earned them.

Shockingly, the study — conducted, remember, by a supposedly impartial body — concluded that the teams who were screwed most often were Reggina, who lost six points and have no chances of getting any sympathy from The Powers that Be, Milan, who lost five points, and Juve, who lost four. Hmm. Do you think Moggi bought them off, too? The other teams most affect were a mixed bag, including Lazio, Inter and and Genoa. Oddly, neither of the articles I can find online says which clubs were most helped by the mistakes (or, if you prefer, “mistakes”). Anyone seen those numbers?

Obviously it’s completely ludicrous to look at individual errors and assume they dictated the result of a match, but one of the great things about Serie A that its observers/fans/haters are OCD enough to do this sort of study. If nothing else, it gives fodder to anyone who want to argue for video replays, or who say that Collina, awesome though he is, isn’t changing anything.

Some Related Serie A Posts:

Category: AC Milan, Juventus, Rumors & News, Serie A

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Martha

Such a different between Mark Cuban commissioning a race-based study and some self-appointed group make a general study of errors, though. Among other things, Mark Cuban is just trying to get attention, as usual, and to get traffic to his blog.

That's what I think is odd, bernd. I was assuming that into just wasn't in the articles I was reading, but you think it's available anywhere? Yeah, that's sketchy.

(Chris, please don't mention Stephen A Smith here ever again. Or if you do, please DO IT LIKE THIS, so we can pretend we're listening to him.)
bernd

Mark Cuban did an independent study involving referees that he handed into David Stern. Cuban was then fined for ever mentioning the study to the press and it was subsequently never released. Of course the Mavericks amazingly made the NBA finals the next season. If the study would have been released it would have probably revealed that the NBA has been fixed since the early nineties. Now who won all those championships in the 90s? You don't say.

Anyhow, the problem I have with them coming out with this is they don't say from which teams they lost points to because of suspect refereeing. Crazy.
chris

They did the same thing with the NBA and "who gets called for more fouls: black or white players?", which got laughed off the face of the earth. Even by guys like Chuck Barkley and Stephen A. Smith, who never fail to play the race card.
Martha

Only in Italy would money be spent on this stuff, I completely love it. Can you imagine something like this about, like, American football? Please.
chris

That article being from the mMilan website is awesome. I wish it had a footnote that said, "and Milan has also lost a whopping 10 points this season due to the shitty play of the team".

My favorite part was where they inform us this study has learned that Reggina was docked 18 points last year. Add that to the -11 they got courtesy of calciopoli, and that puts their point total last year at 69...THIRD PLACE.

Where do these people come up with this shit?