EVERY week, referees find themselves on the receiving end of abuse from thousands of people at football grounds across the country.

This season they have found themselves in the spotlight more than ever before after a huge increase in the number of red and yellow cards they have waved.

But teacher Alan Briscoe can't get enough of the men in black - and has devoted ten years to compiling a database of every refereeing decision taken over the past 20 years.

For Alan, 32, of Beaconsfield Road, Brighton compiling the statistics is a labour of love. But his database has also thrown up some intriguing facts.

His figures confirm what many football fans have always suspected - 87 per cent of refereeing decisions go in favour of Manchester United when they play at Old Trafford.

Albion home games over the past five years, whether at the Goldstone Ground, Gillingham's Priestfield Stadium or Withdean, have seen 69 per cent of decisions going the way of the Seagulls.

Former referee Alan teaches humanities at Thomas Bennett Community College in Crawley, but collects and inputs all the information in his spare time.The mammoth database is believed to be the only one in existence.

Alan, a Preston fan, has the name of every referee who has taken charge of each match, the number of red and yellow cards issued and to which players, records of every penalty and whether they were awarded to the home or away team.

Alan started his mission to find out all the refereeing facts since 1979 a decade ago by searching through football yearbooks to get results, scribbling down much of his data on paper in the early days.

League

But today Alan starts inputting information on to the database by computer as soon as the referee blows his whistle and fills in any missing holes by scanning league tables in the Sunday papers.

And the huge database now has information from more than 50,000, matches.

Alan said: "I have always been interested in refereeing. I used to be a referee a long time ago but I gave it up some years ago, but am always watching the referee's moves in any game.

"Refereeing is an aspect of the game which hardly any research has been done on. There is a lot of data about goalscorers and players but not about referees.

"A lot of publicity about referees is not constructive. They get a very difficult time.

"There are definite differences in referees' decisions which are backed up by the figures, and there has been a steady rise in the number of sendings-off over the years."

After a hard day's work Alan will, on average, spend an hour a night compiling the figures.

He said: "There is so much information about referees it has taken hundreds of hours to put it all together.

"It has been quite a laborious task over the years. I spent many years collecting old yearbooks and checking in old football magazines for statistics.

"I do it as a hobby really and am not into it for the money side of things.

If people have queries I am always happy to answer them but it can often take me a few hours, or even days depending on the information needed to extract the figures."

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