By McG (@fwjmcg)

Referees in soccer are the most necessary evil in the game, we can all agree on that. Without a referee who would call the fouls? Can you imagine Will Johnson calling his own foul? Neither can I. What about Alvaro Saborio? Hahahaha, everything is a foul to that guy. Robot refs? Not likely for another few decades, but one can hope. No, today we all agree that referees are the worst, absolutely the vilest invention to curse our beautiful game, besides every other method of governing a game that has been attempted.

Now that we've all established how much we hate refs, let’s have a real conversation about officiating in MLS. The professional soccer referees association gave way to PRO in MLS in 2012 with legendary FA/FIFA ref Peter Walton leading the way. In actuality they have likely improved the quality of officiating in MLS. Just tune into their Snapchat channel to see the latest and greatest in training, testing, and qualification that North America has to offer. I won’t extol their virtues long, but realize that they are not just bumbling idiots, laughing their way to the proverbial bank with a wheelbarrow full of our emotional strain in tow.

I’m not a referee, nor a referee expert. I have never had the chance to ask any PRO referee who their favorite player to red card is, and why it’s Blas Perez. Nor have I once been privy to the chance to ask them to point to their arse, then their elbow, and smile knowingly as they can’t seem to tell the difference.

What is going on here then? Well, in classic ASA fashion I’ve taken the opportunity to dive into some numbers to figure out a few things about referees that might not be intuited by a single or many viewings of the average MLS game. Some of you (frankly about a dozen) might have seen my series of referee previews prepared for the venerable PTFCollective website that fawn over every backheel of Vytautas Andriuškevičius. Feel free to check them all out here. If your most or least favored referee isn't on the list of articles there, I’m sorry, I only bother to investigate the refs of the team I lose so much sleep over (WHY CANT WE SCORE AGAINST CD DRAGON?!).

With all those biases established, and a little bit about my weird self out of the way, let’s talk about refs. The “PRO pool” as I have coined it is the 20 refs in MLS which have gained the most assignments over the last three years and are still active. Shout out to Kevin Stott, MLS OG, going 21 years strong in this league. There is a hierarchy in PRO, and although they are graded on some cool stat called Key Match Incidents (KMI) which I have exactly 0% insight on, the number and quality of assignments the refs get is a clear indication of how well they are rated. In the top 19 there are three tiers based on assignments.

Tier 1: Ismail Elfath, Baldomero Toledo, Alan Kelly, Allen Chapman, Jair Marrufo – Marrufo is probably in the lead on that tier

Tier 2: Kevin Stott, Ricardo Salazar, Ted Unkel, Mark Geiger, Chris Penso, Armando Villareal, (Hilario Grajeda should be here or maybe even tier 1, but missed most of 2015 due to injury)

Tier 3: Silviu Petrescu, Edvin Juresevic, Juan Guzman, Fotis Bazakos, Drew Fischer, Hilario Grajeda, Jorge Gonzalez, Dave Gantar

There’s a whole other tier of refs who only get spot assignments, or are actually doing pretty well but have a dozen games or less because they are just coming up.

So here we are, six paragraphs in and we’ve barely touched stats even though they were implicitly promised the moment you clicked the link. Well strap in because it’s about to get wild.

Referees differ pretty radically in how they manage a game. Within the PRO pool the average number of fouls per game per ref across three years (672 games in the data set) varies wildly from 21 to 29 fouls per game. Yellow and red cards have even higher levels of variation, from two to four yellows per game, and less than one red every 10 games to nearly a red every other game! And this is just for the top refs!