All change with the whistle for our Premier League return

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Burnley have played 304 Premier League games over eight previous seasons but we will see a big change next season with the departures of five long serving referees since we left the league in May last year.

Those five referees had, between them, the whistle for Burnley games on 108 of those 304 games, more than a third of them which will see a number of our games next season refereed by much less experienced referees.

As we departed the Premier League in May last year following our defeat by Newcastle, so did referees Martin Atkinson, Mike Dean, Kevin Friend and Jon Moss. Between them they had refereed 94 Burnley games in the Premier League.

Embed from Getty ImagesDean (top picture) led the way with 29. His first Burnley game in the top flight was our 5-0 defeat at Spurs in September 2009 and his last was the 3-2 home win against Everton in April last year. Our Premier League record wasn’t bad when Dean refereed either; there were ten win, ten draws and nine defeats.

Atkinson was just behind him with 24 games, starting with the 2-0 defeat at Wolves in December 2009 and ending with another loss, the 1-0 home defeat against Liverpool in February 2022. Atkinson refereed us three times in that last season, all of them ending in defeat, but our record with him was even better than with Dean. We won eleven, drew six and lost seven.

If our records with Dean and Atkinson were good, then it wasn’t quite the same with the next two.

Moss refereed us 21 times in the Premier League, kicking off with a 4-0 loss at West Brom in August 2014 and ending with a 1-1 draw at Crystal Palace in February 2022, the last away point we won under Sean Dyche. Overall, it wasn’t good with Moss, just four wins and four draws alongside thirteen defeats. Three of those wins did come away from home though, two at Everton and that memorable night at Old Trafford when, on this occasion, even he couldn’t stop us.

Embed from Getty ImagesThat takes us to Friend. He first refereed us in the Premier League when we beat Birmingham at home in October 2009 while his last was the controversial 1-0 loss at Spurs when we were beaten to a VAR penalty. Nothing like as bad as the Moss record but we won six, drew four and lost ten of the twenty games he refereed.

This summer they have been joined by Andre Marriner (bottom picture wrongly showing Erik Pieters a red card in a 1-1 draw against Arsenal) who is hanging up his whistle after nineteen years as a Football League and Premier League referee. He refereed just fourteen of our Premier League games which kicked off with the 3-1 home defeat against Everton in October 2014 and ended with Chelsea’s 4-0 Turf Moor win in March last year. We won just two of those games with Marriner, drew two and lost ten.

I suspect Moss, Friend and Marriner won’t be missed given our results but there might be differing views on no longer having games refereed by either Dean or Atkinson.

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