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4 published

Studies

One question each, registered before the data is pulled where that was possible and marked as exploratory where it was not. Corrections are appended, never quietly applied.

One pre-registered test has not resolved yet, and is tracked in the open rather than held back: The Portuguese season as it stands. It is expected to change, and it is not a result.

Football03L1 (descriptive)

The lever nobody pulls

Whether a foul is punished depends enormously on where and when it happens. A foul in your own defensive fifth is carded 31.4% of the time; the same offence in the attacking fifth, 8.9%. A foul in the opening quarter of an hour is carded 6.5% of the time; after ninety minutes, 25.6%.

Published
Figures
4 figures
Football04L3 (confirmed pattern)

How much of a booking index is real?

A club's yellows-per-foul rate over one season is mostly noise. 15% of the spread between clubs is a real club property; the other 85% is the Poisson accident of one season's bookings.

Published
Figures
2 figures
Football02L2 (hypothesis, adjusted)

A club that fouls with impunity, and the four ways I was wrong about it

Across eleven European leagues (58,013 completed matches, 115,984 team-matches, and 246 clubs with 150+ matches), raw yellow-cards-per-foul ratios make almost every dominant domestic club in Europe appear leniently officiated (r = −0.371). That apparent impunity is a compound artifact of three confounders: pre-match win expectation (1.098 heavy underdog vs. 0.856 heavy favourite median across all eleven leagues), non-foul conduct cards (dissent, delaying restarts, simulation) entering as a positive affine intercept (11.1%–38.8% league-mean share; 13%–47% across league-seasons), and fixture-level competitive intensity shared by both teams on the pitch (r = +0.283 on opponents' booking indices; 11 of 11 leagues rising across opponent-strength terciles 0.938 to 0.993 to 1.088).

Published
Figures
8 figures
Football01L1 (descriptive)

What free football data can still tell you

Public European football repositories exhibit severe longitudinal truncation, unrecorded rule differences in second-yellow accounting, non-foul conduct cards in the yellow-card numerator, and missing referee identifiers across 9 of 11 European leagues. Across 286 completed league-season files in 11 top divisions (2000-01 to 2025-26), only 179 files (62.6%) carry foul and card statistics (58,013 completed matches), while the remaining 107 files return HTTP 200 and parse cleanly into tables containing zero match events. Referee identity is recorded in only 55 of 286 files — continuously in England and Scotland, for two early seasons in Germany and Italy, and never in the other seven leagues.

Published
Figures
3 figures