Brace yourselves, it’s Brighton away

March 20 – Brighton and Hove Albion on England’s sunny and clearly not-so-easy going south coast is one of the most likely place in Europe’s top league’s where you are going to get a kicking if you are a professional player, according to new data from the CIES Football Observatory.

An analysis of the ratio between fouls suffered and committed show Brighton top the aggressors list with a ratio of 0.68. On average they commit 12.8 fouls per game, getting 8.8 in return.

But while they top the list by ratio, they don’t commit the most fouls in Europe.

“The highest number of fouls committed per match was measured for Getafe (17.1). In the other leagues, the top values were recorded for Torino (16.8), Dijon (15.8), Augsburg (14.2) and Brighton & Hove (12.8). Conversely, Borussia Dortmund players have on average committed the least fouls per game (8.4). In the other championships of the big-5, the lowest figures were observed for Manchester City (8.5), Barcelona (10.5), Napoli (10.7) and Nice (11.2),” says the CIES.

Barcelona had the highest ratio of 1.5 in the Big 5 leagues, receiving  15.7 fouls on average per match and giving away 10.8.

The CIES data also looks at the average number of fouls per fixture finding a variation from 20.9 in the Premier League to 27.0 in the Liga. “This strong gap partially reflects the existence of different styles of refereeing,” said the report. “In the remaining leagues, these values are 24.0 in Bundesliga, 26.4 in Ligue 1 and 26.6 in Serie A.”

See the full report at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2018/255/en/

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