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From the Guardian
Chelsea, like Manchester City, have received just four bookings this season, a league low. Each Premier League team has, on average, been shown 8.1. The third most-cautioned team in the division is Brighton, with 10, and Watford are at No 2 with 12. West Ham have earned 18.
It is not possible to blame the rogue thuggery of a couple of miscreants for this situation. West Ham excepted, the average Premier League club has so far had 5.8 different players booked this season. Southampton and Manchester United have each had eight players booked and Everton, second on the list of offenders, have had nine.
Fourteen different West Ham players have already been booked in league games. Strangely, this is despite the fact they are only ninth on the list of most fouling teams in the top flight, conceding 58 free-kicks (excluding offsides). Individually, Glenn Murray has committed 20 fouls, most in the division. Felipe Anderson, Arthur Masuaku, Marko Arnautovic and Fabián Balbuena, West Ham’s fouliest players, are joint 44th, having between them committed only fractionally more (24) than Murray alone. So what is going on here, and is there some dastardly refereeing bias at play?
It would seem not, because the really strange thing is the identity of the most-fouled team in the top flight, the one awarded more free-kicks than any other: it’s West Ham
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