Who Are The Dirtiest Teams And Players In The Premier League?

Football fans will always be convinced that their team is hard done to, whilst other sides get away with murder. Don’t forget that Leeds United have long had a reputation of being one of the dirtiest teams around, even being referred to as ‘dirty, dirty Leeds’, yet their supporters will always exclaim the side’s innocence.

The obvious questions that come up are firstly whether there’s much truth in the idea of one team or a player being dirtier than another and secondly whether there’s any way to actually tell.

This is an important factor in modern betting too as you can now wager on players to be booked along with team booking points and therefore knowing what teams and players are dirtier than others can be highly useful information.  It is also important to consider for other bets, such as goalscorer, etc., as a player can’t score if they’ve been sent off!

Anyone who watches the modern game will tell you that certain players (Fernandinho at ManCity was a good example), regularly get away with a whole host of fouls without being punished for them by the match referee, so do yellow and red cards give us a fair reflection of how ‘dirty’ a player is?

Having a good idea of which players are the most likely to get booked and which teams are most commonly punished for their play with bookings and sending off can help when it comes to placing bets on booking points, yellow cards and sendings off.

That’s what we’ll try to do here.

Player Bookings

The problem with stats and information on bookings is that they change all of the time. Games take place virtually every week between August and May, sometimes twice a week.

With that in mind, the notion of bookings, sending offs and ‘dirty’ play is difficult to track with any sense of immediacy.

Even so, knowing which players have been shown the most yellow cards in the history of the top-flight offers some insight into the sort of players that tend to find themselves in the referee’s bad books.

The table below looks at the players that were booked most between the start of the Premier League in 1992 and December 2021.

Teams Bookings

One of the standout things from the lists above is the number of teams that are on them more than once. In many instances it’s teams that often tend to be in relegation battles, such as Middlesbrough, Queens Park Rangers and Everton. There are more than a few of the most successful teams on the list, though, with Manchester United featuring a few times.

Between the competition’s opening season in 1992 and the end of the 2018-2019 campaign, 49 teams have plied their trade in the Premier League. Obviously it goes without saying that the teams that have been in the division for the longest, such as Everton and Manchester United, are more likely to have received more cards than the teams that have only played a couple of seasons in the top-flight.

Where teams fit into the list depends on whether you’re looking at the total number of cards received or the average number of cards per game played. For example, Liverpool have quite a high number of cards against their name, but the average number of cards per game is actually quite low because of how many Premier League games the Merseyside club have played over the years.

The table below looks at the top 10 according to the number of booking points received by a team:

From that list you’d imagine that the teams on it are the most dirty that the Premier League has seen, but it goes without saying that the more games you play the more likely you are to get a booking or a sending off.

Because of that, the table offers a skewed sense of whether or not teams are actually all that dirty. You might be tempted to stick a bet on there being loads of cards in a match between Chelsea and Everton, say, but you might well be mistaken to do so.

In order to get a better idea of which teams are liable to receive booking points during one off matches, it makes more sense to look at the top ten teams for booking points per match played.

Here’s the top ten for your consideration:

The interesting thing about this list is that none of the teams in the first list are on it. That might be linked to the fact that most, if not all, of the sides listed here have endured a mixed relationship with the Premier League. All of them have been relegated out of at one point or another and only Watford are still in the top-flight as of the 2019-2020 campaign.

It’s suggestive of teams that need to battle for their survival being the most likely to foul and give away free-kicks or penalties. The result of that is that sides tend to player closer to the edge and are therefore more likely to pick up booking points.

If you’re thinking of placing a bet on how many bookings there’ll be in a match or how many points will be racked up then it’s worth having a look at if there’s a decent combination of teams struggling for survival with combative players in their ranks. If a player has a hot-head in the mould of Wayne Rooney or Duncan Ferguson then it’s even more noteworthy ahead of your betting.

How Bookings Have Changed Over The Years

It’s an obvious question to ask, but have bookings changed much over the years?

That is to say, was there an era in the Premier League when players were at their dirtiest in terms of the number of bookings and red cards that they were shown?

The table below looks at the most yellow and red cards that a player has received across the course of each season, as well as how many players were shown that many of the cards.

As you can see, the fewest yellow cards dished out to a player during the season is 10 and the most is 14. It’s interesting to note that in all but two of the season when 14 yellow cards were shown, 5 players were also sent off.

It’s suggestive of a season in which either players were more likely to engage in violent play or else referees were more card happy than in previous seasons. That’s backed up by seasons in which the fewest yellow cards were shown also being ones in which only 2 red cards were shown to the same players over the course of a campaign.

It’s far from a perfect system, but the Premier League’s website is kept up to date during seasons when it comes to cards shown, so it’s worth having a look to see if referees appear to be card happy during the campaign before you place any bets.