Are MLS referees really any worse than Premier League officials?

By on December 7, 2015

It was a hot summers’ day at Avaya Stadium in early June of last summer and slightly more humid than was typical for the Bay Area. FC Dallas were visiting San Jose to face the Earthquakes in a nationally-broadcast Major League Soccer fixture. Six months on, nobody remembers that game for its small nuances and as a contest, it was a scrappy, rather forgettable scoreless draw. Yet that match sticks in the minds of many who witnessed it because of referee Baldomero Toledo, who dished out three controversial red cards. One call on Mark Sherrod was blatantly wrong, another red was questionable and only JJ Koval’s late lunge was worthy of an early bath.

Toledo is an infamous figure in MLS, known to throw around red and yellow cards for fun with little consistency; search his name on Google and an article titled “Dear Major League Soccer: We need to talk about referee Baldomero Toledo. Again!” is near the top of the page and other results are “MLS is a joke unless it addresses Toledo” and “Inconsistent MLS referees are damaging the game”.


These sort of articles surface whenever Toledo makes his next highly controversial call. With every poor call an MLS referee makes the argument that Pro Soccer referees are far inferior than their European counterparts and that American soccer suffers after the result. But let’s take the twelve-year-old-Youtube-commenter fury out of this debate and approach this in an analytical way. Every referee makes mistakes and there is nothing that even the best of them can do to stop that.

Yet what everybody looks for in a referee is consistency, and from that assumption the old cliche that you don’t notice a good referee was born.

MLS referees, they say, are wildly inconsistent compared to their English counterparts. In our attempt to find a conclusive answer to this supposition, we began by comparing the average number of yellow cards dished out per game by referees who officiated more than five matches in each league (though it should be noted that Dave Gantar issued six reds in just five MLS matches last season). MLS is off to a good start here as the difference is immaterial at less than three thousandths of a red card per game.

However, the difference in red cards — roughly 0.19-per-game in the EPL and .25-per-game in MLS is — more head turning. Also, the six referees who only officiated five or fewer games last season in MLS dealt seven more red cards then their counterparts, four referees, in the EPL. So more red cards are dealt in MLS than in the EPL, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that American referees are less consistent, as it could simply reflect the style of play.

Yet if we dig a little deeper in the stats, there’s one big difference between the two datasets. The standard deviation of both yellows-per-game and reds-per-game dished out by referees is noticeably higher in MLS than in the EPL, meaning that MLS matches are somewhat less consistent in the cards department, though even here the consistency of play could be a factor.

Screenshot 2015-12-07 23.10.48

Of course, this fairly short and sweet analysis is fairly limited given it can’t judge missed calls, or smaller mistakes with big implications; such as the horrific missed out-of-bounds call that lead to the Portland Timbers’ eventual winner in the MLS Cup final yesterday. But if there are any takeaways that it gives us, it’s that a few MLS referees dish out more red cards than need be. It’s not a surprise but perhaps a small proof in piecing together the larger puzzle.

Photo credit: By Ben Keller [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.