A stat doing the rounds on social media proclaims that Celtic receive the least number of cautions per fouls committed, 9.5 per card to be exact.
Whilst that looks good for those who like to fuel the preposterous narrative that somehow Celtic enjoys the leniency courtesy of the referees (no laughing at the back please) it doesn’t tell the entire story.
What the pushers of these stats conveniently forget or ignore is that not every foul is worthy of a caution, or that our opponents have an annoying tendency to fall to the ground whenever anyone in a green and white shirt breathes in their vicinity.
The biggest percentage of those ‘offences’ are committed further up the field and warrant no more than a free kick to the opposition, so it makes the foul count stack up in games we overwhelmingly enjoy the majority of possession.
There are no ‘dark arts’ at play. We dominate games as we are the best footballing side in a playing and disciplinary sense. If anything the officials are more lenient in the sense that they fail to punish the brutality often dished out to our players. You won’t see that in the stats.
Just an Ordinary Bhoy
If you look at fouls given based on possession stats then Celtic have the highest numbers of fouls per minute of opposition possession. This is consistently the case every season. The reason the yellow card stats appear low for Celtic is due to the very high number of trivial free kicks given to opposition teams.