I’m a lifelong Everton fan. I’ve spent more Saturday afternoons than I can count shouting at referees, or at least at the television showing me one. “That was never a foul.” “How has VAR not looked at that?” “Who even is this ref?” “Are they always this bad for us?”
Those questions never went away. And eventually I started wondering whether the answers were actually out there, just not in one place.
The data existed. Premier League match records, card counts, results, major decisions. What didn’t exist was a tool that pulled it all together from the perspective of a specific club. Something that could tell an Everton fan, or a Spurs fan, or a Leeds fan, what their actual historical record looked like with any given official. Not a feeling. Not a pub argument. Numbers.
So I built it.
Who’s That Ref? is a free platform that tracks Premier League referee performance from every club’s point of view. Each referee and VAR official gets a Referee Performance Score, a 0 to 5 rating that combines historical match outcomes with real officiating decisions. Penalties, red cards, disallowed goals. The things that change games.
The database behind it covers over 1,800 Premier League matches across five seasons, over 50 officials, 27 clubs, and over 160,000 historical data points. That took months to build. Every match verified manually, every major decision reviewed before it touched a score.”
A score of 2.5 is neutral. Above that, historically good for your club. Below it, historically not. And before anyone asks: the RPS measures correlation, not causation. A low score doesn’t prove a referee has it in for your team. But it does mean something. The pattern of outcomes when they’re in charge hasn’t gone your way, and over enough matches, that’s worth paying attention to.
The question the site answers is one every fan asks before every game. Who’s the ref? Who’s on VAR? What can we expect?
Now you can actually look it up.
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