BCFC101

This certainly seems plausible to me and could explain some of the decisions. There's also probably various individual penalty shouts where there's an additional human nature element at play that led to that decision. For example, the Atkinson incident on Tuesday. From our point of view it's immediately a penalty, but the refs thoughts might have gone like this - a centre back who isn't outstanding on the ball finds himself with it 30 yards from goal. There's no obvious passing options, it's unlikely he'll want to shoot, and he doesn't have the technical ability to dribble past a couple of players to make space for himself. The best option in this circumstance is for Atkinson to try get into the box and win a penalty, and the ref knows that before Atkinson even gets there. 2 seconds later the player does get into the box and is knocked down as soon as he's in there, by which point the ref may have already made up his mind that he's not going to give the pen because it's clear from the situation that's what Atkinson is after. Now I'm not saying it's right of the referee to think like that because they shouldn't, but his human nature and experience of previous similar situations will have kicked in. This also doesn't explain most of the clear penalties that we should have had that weren't given, but maybe explains the thinking behind some decisions. Either way, every time this happens we're being hard done by and it's incredibly frustrating. Fair play for digging into it, thank you, I think we all owe you a pint for spending a bit of time to get the extra info! I think it's fair to say based on those findings that this particular piece might be playing a small part in why we have less penalties that average, but there's still more factors and we'll probably never find all of them.

Great work @Olé, thanks for sharing that, some interesting points there and perhaps not what was expected. I wonder if in the absence of a stat for box entries we could look at how many of those shots from the box have come directly from crosses (what would be even better is if there was a stat for how many of those shots were on first contact by the player that took the shot). My theory here being that, from subjective memory, we have over the last few years been a team that has favoured getting the ball out wide and getting in as many crosses as we possibly can, more so than other teams, and of course some of these crosses lead to shots. If the proportion of those shots coming from crosses is high, then we could argue that the link between shots taken and penalties given is broken because a cross is less likely to lead to a penalty than a dribble is. While I'm thinking about this, it would actually be really interesting to see a stat on crosses in comparison to other teams generally, not just those that lead to shots but all crosses. This still won't be perfect and would be a stronger data point if there was a statistic for what proportion of all of a team's attacks involve a cross, but even without that if we were to find that we've generally attempted more crosses per match than other teams, then we could say that this likely (though not definitely) means less dribbles into the box compared to other teams, and therefore less opportunity for penalties to be given.

I think the realisation is there and that’s why we’re having this discussion. The statistic has caught everyone’s attention because it is truly astounding and you’re right that at face value, calling it an anomaly would be an understatement. However, people are now eager to understand just why this is the case. There is definitely going to be a number of reasons for it, some which have been called out already, but these don’t account for the whole gap between us and the rest of the EFL and there are will be many more reasons. As it stands we don’t have all of the information and data required to explain fully what’s going on here, but the direction that the conversation is going in is to try find those additional reasons.

I absolutely agree with most of your points across this thread, all things that will have certainly contributed to why the statistic looks like it does, and your reasoning is probably the closest to the real reason for why we're seeing this. There definitely isn't a conspiracy against us, because why would there be, and the likelihood is that it's just chance, bad luck, whatever you want to call it, which happens to be at an extreme end of the scale over the last couple of years. And even then I can't help myself but question a couple of things We know that for a significant portion of the period measured we've been absolute dogshit at attacking. It's only in the last 50 or so games that we've been better going forward, and even that is essentially an improvement from "non-existent" to "average". The latest 2 graphs shown here by myself and spudski are measuring the most recent 87 matches we've played, starting from our game v Huddersfield on 3rd November 2020, up to and including Luton game on Tuesday. Within that data set we have the whole of the 21/22 season, just over 50% of the contributing data, where we had the best attack out of all teams outside the top 6 in the Championship (based on goals scored alone, I do of course appreciate that having the best attack is subjective and there are more factors). So for me the 'poor in attack' argument struggles to hold up for this data set. What about the previous 87 matches? The link posted by BCFCGav on the 1st page covers a data set which includes 101 matches before the latest 2 graphs posted this morning. Unfortunately (in the case of this point) there are 62 matches which overlap both data sets so we're not able to make an exact comparison in the way that you're after. I think we can attribute more weight to the 'poor in attack' argument for that data set, although it does stand out to me that the headline statistic actually gets even worse during the 'slightly better than poor in attack' period as opposed to that first set.. The main reason these graphs are popping up is just the magnitude of the anomaly being shown. When 90 other teams are shown to be in a relatively flat line at the bottom, it'd be hard to ignore even the Port Vale anomaly which will almost certainly have an explanation, let alone the Bristol City dot which is up in the heavens compared to the other 90 dots.

Same stat as the table linked earlier but with more data, running up to and including yesterday Truly astounding ?

Made me laugh more than it should. Also... r/angryupvote ^ A Reddit reference for anyone that uses it.

Baldock already misses 1 on 1

"Louis Carey's experience won Bristol City their penalty at Notts County today. He warned the ref to look for Leacock pulling Flint in box" "Seconds later, Leacock offends again and the referee is well-placed to see the incident. A stone wall penalty!"

BUT Posh lose their lead.

Barnsley back in the lead.

Hartlepool's two goal scorers today are called Hartley and Poole.

Posh winning.

Uh oh. Never mind, bring on Forest.

Stead on for Davies.

P'boro equalise.

Blackpool equalise v Barnsley.

Fontaine now captain.

And now Ipswich winning.

shit

What's your hedgehogs prediction?

Barnsley 1 up :/

Wendys winning.

That was on Saturday. Baldock and Davies started together on Tuesday.

Im from Poland and I can tell you for a fact that Brozek isnt wanted at Celtic and so is looking for a new club