A couple of years ago, I was reading Ben Goldacre's book “Bad Science” and fuming over a free-kick given against Artur Boruc while kicking the ball out against Falkirk, and wondering if refereeing bias (or the absence of it) could be measure in a scientific way, rather than just subjective debates about “paranoia” and “conspiracy”

I came up with the following idea and I've included some other ideas for improving football in Scotland with science.

In reaction to Celtic's dossier of dodgy refereeing decisions, I've seen a few people recently say "any team could come up with a list of decisions that have gone against their team". This led to me thinking "Well, could they? if they could, would all the lists be equally compelling?". It's easy to list anecdotal evidence from far-off cup finals, but is there any way to make it more scientific?

I think there could be, but it would require a TV station to orchestrate some scientific endeavour. Here is my experiment.

The TV company approach the most popular fans website for each SPL team. They ask them to nominate incidents from this season's SPL where they think that their team has been hard-done-by. let's say 20 per team. how they decide on the 20 is up to them (an internet vote might be hijacked by other teams, for example).

We now need to have these incidents evaluated by bona fide neutrals. I'm going to assume that no-one in Scotland is neutral, not even Chick Young.

League Season Simulator

Too many things that are contentious in Scottish football are unnecessarily decided behind closed doors. This gives the impression that there are no clear rules and that decisions are open to influence. For example, who will play when, who the officials will be, and whether the season will be extended.

The rules associated with this may be complex. The weather and other postponements, the police, the TV companies, the standings at the time of the split and Scottish teams' participation in Europe. However if this isn't so complex that George Peat or Neil Doncaster can't get their head around it in a meeting, then it's not so complex that a computer can't model those rules and apply them impartially.

Rules might include “If a team gets to a European final the league will be extended by a week”.

Anyone should be able to go to the SPL website and say “if the teams are in these positions at the break what will happen” and see exactly when all the games will be played. “If the following game is postponed, when will it be replayed, and who will referee it?”. 

This would stop arguments about who plays when after the split, which referees are selected for big (and small) games, and whether the league is extended, without reference to which clubs are involved. This would remove the cloud of suspicion that the decisions are influenced by begging through the press.

The Clypatron 3000

Although the police have arrested a few people for online hate crimes related to football, these represent a tiny percentage of the incidents on the web. This has led to fans forming posses (or crowd-sourcing justice) to expose the culprits in other ways. This could increase the number of prosecutions, but has downsides.

Although this often done in a responsible way, I think that when carried out more widely, any method that doesn't involve the police will be dangerous. There is always the danger of vigilantes publishing addresses, which is wrong if the person is guilty and the address is correct, and even more wrong if mistakes are made.  So I've been thinking about a realistic way in which members of the public could interact with the police which wouldn't lead to a slew of tit-for-tat vexatious allegations that would lead to the police ignoring them all.  If it's a free-for-all, I can imagine some sites initiating a campaign to report anyone who has ever said "hun", for example.

So I think there there should be a web interface where people can register, and be background-checked by the police.  The police can then work out how many allegations they can handle in a week and set a capacity for how many allegations can be made by each user. Initially these would be spread equally over all the registered users, but the police can rate the quality of allegation so that those who do well (in terms of seriousness of allegation and evidence provided) are allowed to make more allegations, and others fewer allegations.

The police would have to provide clear guidelines on what they wanted to be told about, and the kind of evidence that should, and shouldn't, be gathered.  the total capacity for allegations would also be a measurement of how seriously the police are taking the problem.

The chances are Celtic fans would mostly just report Rangers fans and vice versa, but as long as those in question were guilty, I would have no problem with that.

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