Possession Vs Yellow Cards

Whenever I see the possession ratings at the end of a game I wonder how much of an effect this has had on the result. I especially wonder how many free kicks are given away how many yellow cards are picked up, and how many times this has led to poor results or run of form because the team with the ball play simple football.

Overall when you have the ball you normally cannot get a yellow card for a foul. Let us say in general it is the team that doesn’t have the ball that commits a foul and not the other way round. So here we go with our table. The table based on possession. First comes the team with most possession and last the team who can’t seem to keep it.

	2010-2011	Possession ranking
	Team	Poss	Yellow	Red
1	Arsenal	60%	65	6
2	Chelsea	58%	59	1
3	Manchester United	56%	56	3
4	Manchester City	53%	71	4
5	Tottenham	53%	51	2
6	Liverpool	52%	63	2
7	Fulham	50%	52	1
8	Everton	50%	55	5
9	Newcastle	50%	78	2
10	Wigan	50%	67	4
11	Wolverhampton	50%	62	2
12	Blackpool	49%	47	2
13	Aston Villa	48%	71	2
14	Sunderland	48%	57	5
15	West Bromwich	48%	52	7
16	Birmingham	47%	57	3
17	Bolton	46%	67	5
18	West Ham	44%	59	1
19	Blackburn	41%	65	5
20	Stoke	38%	68	2

So Arsenal is top of the league when it comes to possession. Well this will not be a big surprise to most people when you consider Arsenal keep the ball on the ground and very rarely hoof it up the park
So according to my theory you would expect to see Stoke with the most yellow cards closely followed by Blackburn and West Ham
In fact the teams with the most yellow card are Newcastle (78) A.villa(71) and Man City(71)

My theory seems to be wrong! There does not seem to be a direct link between having the majority of possession and the least yellow cards
However I would still try to pick players from teams who control the game whilst at the same time avoiding the bad boys of football
It doesn’t seem to be as simple as that though does it? I suppose that’s just the funny old game that is football