Patterns of Assistance: "An anomaly that cannot be explained"
On Thursday 28th March the following podcast was recorded on the A Celtic State of Mind platform. You can view it here or listen wherever you consume your pods.
This is the first in a series of articles putting on record the details behind the data.
First up, The Rangers remarkable lack of jeopardy as regards conceding penalties.
From January 18th 2022, until January 2nd 2024, The Rangers did not concede a penalty in the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) Premiership.
The handball awarded against John Souttar of The Rangers and to Kilmarnock was the first penalty the Glasgow side had been penalised for in 75 league games.
John Beaton, an active Scottish referee, called this run “a statistical anomaly that cannot be explained”. Graham Spiers a respected Scottish football journalist stated on his Press Box Podcast that the run was “bizarre”. In the Press and Journal of December 2nd, 2023, Richard Gordon asked “can that (the penalty-less run) remarkable statistic be explained”?
This run followed a similar 44-league game run without a penalty against from 30th December 2019 to 20th April 2021.
Note that refereeing services in Scotland are the sole domain of the SFA. The SFA recruits, trains, develops, assigns, monitors, assesses, and promotes/demotes referees for the provision of their services to the SPFL. Crawford Allan was appointed Head of Refereeing Operations at the Scottish Football Association (SFA) on 13th January 2020.
The Rangers Penalties Against Run
The Rangers run of 75 league matches without conceding a penalty was remarkable in that Video Assistant Referee (VAR) processes were introduced on October 21st, 2022, nine months into this almost two-year streak.
Pre use of VAR processes, there was an average of 1.97 (2020-21) and 1.68 (2021-22) penalties awarded in each set of fixtures.
Last season when VAR was introduced part way through, the number of penalties jumped up to 2.42 per game week – a 44% increase. This season, roughly halfway through, that was reduced to 2.16 per game week but still at a higher rate than pre-VAR levels.
At a time when most clubs were seeing an increase in penalties awarded under the all-seeing eye of VAR, The Rangers managed to avoid jeopardy in their own penalty area.
There have been other significant runs of matches across Europe where a single club has avoided conceding a penalty as shown in this table provided by X account @scotlandscoeff1:
Only one of these runs has been achieved with VAR in operation – Liverpool in 2022.
The red numbers indicate the number of penalties AWARDED to that side during those runs.
So, although Racing Club Lens of France went 103 matches without concession, they received only seven penalties in their favour. The Rangers have received 24.
No club in this table has received more penalties simultaneous to a barren run of concession. The closest is Barcelona (21) whose run ran from 2016 to 2018. The club are under formal investigation for suspected bribery of referees over this period. Also, VAR was not in operation in Spain at that time.
Most major European leagues now have VAR operational. In the top 20 leagues by UEFA ranking, no other club failed to have a penalty awarded against them in the 2022-23 season.
Even more staggering is the sheer size of the penalty differential gap that The Rangers have versus every other club in the SPFL. That is the difference between penalties awarded and conceded.
The following is attributed to @JBLuvsCeltic on the X platform. It covers a period starting in the 2018-19 season where Celtic were heavily dominant.
The Rangers had 46 more penalties awarded than conceded. The next highest was dominant Celtic on 21 (won four out of five titles).
Based on the Z-Score of the Margins, there is one statistically significant outlier. The Rangers (-2.77 number of standard deviations from the mean) almost double the Z-Score of title dominant Celtic (-1.26).
Penalties conceded is, however, just one data point. And long runs without concession do occur. So, it is a pattern of assistance, or just one of those things?
Next question - How many penalties SHOULD The Rangers have conceded?
Note: Data correct up to January 3rd 2024.