At FBM we divide players into four categories, namely:
- Excellent players, who have a FBM score of 8 or higher.
- Good players who have a FBM score between 5.5 and 8.
- Average players who have a FBM score between 2 and 5.5.
- Bad players who have a FBM score of below 2.
Our assumption is that bad players are more likely to get a red card than excellent players. For example, here is the FBM graph for Faes from KV Oostende of the match before he got a red card:
So we looked at 34 red cards in 161 matches in the Dutch Eredivisie and Belgium Jupiler League.
Here is the raw data:
| Excellent players | 0 |
| Good players | 1 |
| Average players | 16 |
| Bad players | 17 |
As you can see a low FBM score does indeed correlate with a significant higher chance to get a red card.
So looking at culmulative chances per match you see the chance on a red card:
| Good and excellent players | 0.62% |
| Average players | 10% |
| Average and bad players | 20% |
So if a player has a FBM score of below 5.5, but above 2, he has a 10% to get a red card in any given match. Whereas the chance on a red card for a good or excellent players is only 0.62%. That is more than 15 times bigger chance for an average player than for a good or excellent player.
If you also include the bad players then they have a more than 30 times bigger chance on a red card than a good or excellent player.
What is also nice to see, is that good players, if they get a red card, most often it is in a period where their FBM score was below their average score. Or to put it more clearly: if good players get a red card, most of the time it is when they are out of form.
If we look beyond a match and look at the indiviual players, here are the chances for a red card per player:
| Excellent players | 0.0003% |
| Good players | 0.0003% |
| Average players | 0.45% |
| Bad players | 0.47% |
What this means is that for every bad or average player in your team, you increase your chances for a red card by about 0.5%. So in the match PSV vs Feyenoord of February 24th 2019, PSV had 2.8% chance on a red card and Feyenoord had 4.8%.
If you compare the Dutch Eredivisie and Belgium Jupiler League where there is a red card every 5 matches with the Premier League, where there are better players, then you see that in the Premier League there is a red card only every 10 matches.