Jon Moss has been named as the worst referee in this season’s Premier League after the number of major mistakes by officials were tallied up by you-are-the-ref.com.
Arsenal fans will be absolutely gobsmacked to learn that Anthony Taylor has apparently made the fewest mistakes.
Yes, that Anthony Taylor.
YATR found that there have been 84 key mistakes (penalties given incorrectly, not given, goals allowed or disallowed incorrectly, and red cards given or not given in error) so far this season (up to April 22nd).
That across 333 matches.
Coming in behind Taylor as the least error-prone referee (I still can’t believe I’m writing that) are Michael Oliver, Mike Dean (I’m starting to really question this data), Kevin Friend and Mark Clattenburg.
Moss has racked up 13 key errors, or, to put it another way, one every game and a half. Taylor, YATF claim, makes only one error per nine games.
Perhaps the fact that these results are based only on key incidents is skewing things because I’m pretty sure if you watch Anthony Taylor and Mike Dean, especially if it is an Arsenal game, the cumulative effect of the small wrong calls they make can be devastating.
It’s certainly worth noting that YATR clarify their findings by saying “Mistakes only qualified if the weekly Ref Show panel came to the same verdict on an incident.
“Only big, result-influencing calls made the category – decisions on goals, sendings-off and penalties.”
As someone once said (no-one can quite work out who really uttered the words), “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”