Lots of fouls, not enough yellow cards

[turnip]

Something that's been annoying the hell out of me for the last 2-3 versions of FM is that rubbish teams in the league will basically spend the 90 minutes kicking lumps out of your players in the league, particularly once you're considerably better than they are. And they don't get nearly enough Yellow Cards for their fouls. See this game that I just played:

It's not every time, but it happens often enough to be annoying. I think the most I've seen is one guy making 11 fouls in a game without getting booked. One of our guys did actually get fouled 11 times in this game. Does anyone else find this, and find it really annoying?

It's not a bug, but it does seem to be a weird refereeing-tactics issue.

[FrazT]

You do see this on some occasions and conversely, I often see a game where a team has committed 4 fouls and gets 3 yellow cards.  I am sure that it balances out over a season.

[turnip]

Short of anything better to do for 10 minutes, I thought I'd do a bit of data collection.

In the last 27 league games we've played, the following has happened

Fouls we commit: average per game - 7 (minimum: 3, max 14); average yellows per game - 0.4

Fouls opponents commit: average per game - 21.5 (minimum 6, max 37); average yellows per game - 2. (There were two straight reds for the oppo in the same data set).

 

A quick bit of internet searching suggests that, in the Premier League at least, there are on average 21 fouls per game, and an average of 4 yellow cards.

So the numbers from my data seem high for fouls and low for yellow cards (remember that the Premier League stats will be for both teams).

 

As to whether it's an issue - well, clearly in the games we win 5-0 it doesn't really matter that my players have been kicked as far as they've run over the 90 minutes. But smaller teams will use persistent fouling as a strategy to nullify attacking play and their players not getting booked means they can keep it up for 90 minutes when, in real life, they'd either have to knock it off or be substituted at some point due to being on a yellow card. 

(Part of me also wonders if this is linked to new referees apparently not being generated as a save progresses, but that's just me hypothesising.)

[zyfon5]

28 minutes ago, turnip said:

Short of anything better to do for 10 minutes, I thought I'd do a bit of data collection.

In the last 27 league games we've played, the following has happened

Fouls we commit: average per game - 7 (minimum: 3, max 14); average yellows per game - 0.4

Fouls opponents commit: average per game - 21.5 (minimum 6, max 37); average yellows per game - 2. (There were two straight reds for the oppo in the same data set).

 

A quick bit of internet searching suggests that, in the Premier League at least, there are on average 21 fouls per game, and an average of 4 yellow cards.

So the numbers from my data seem high for fouls and low for yellow cards (remember that the Premier League stats will be for both teams).

 

As to whether it's an issue - well, clearly in the games we win 5-0 it doesn't really matter that my players have been kicked as far as they've run over the 90 minutes. But smaller teams will use persistent fouling as a strategy to nullify attacking play and their players not getting booked means they can keep it up for 90 minutes when, in real life, they'd either have to knock it off or be substituted at some point due to being on a yellow card. 

(Part of me also wonders if this is linked to new referees apparently not being generated as a save progresses, but that's just me hypothesising.)

There is a flaw with this methodology. You are comparing the averages of one team with the average of the whole league. You will need to take the average of the whole league in your save to have a fair comparison with the average of the Premier League. Or you can list down the averages of each team in the Premier League and compare it with your team in your save.

[turnip]

7 minutes ago, zyfon5 said:

There is a flaw with this methodology. You are comparing the averages of one team with the average of the whole league. You will need to take the average of the whole league in your save to have a fair comparison with the average of the Premier League. Or you can list down the averages of each team in the Premier League and compare it with your team in your save.

Fair point.

Still seems low, though