Licence and attribution
Short version: the figures RefCard computes are CC BY 4.0 — use them, credit us. The panel verdicts we quote are somebody else's journalism and are cited to them, not licensed by us. The two are separated below because conflating them would be us licensing something we do not own.
What RefCard licenses
Under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0:
- the compilation — the season-by-season referee records, the per-match tables, the matchweek pages and the CSV distributions;
- the derived figures — fouls and cards per game, foul-to-card ratios, the booking-reason composition, the seasonal arc, the separability measurements;
- the model outputs — fairness grades, net xG impact per incident, the added-time expectation model, and the on-field/VAR error attribution.
Attribute as: RefCard (therefcard.com), CC BY 4.0. A link to the page you took it
from is welcome and helps a reader check the figure, which is the point.
What RefCard does not license, and cannot
The Key Match Incidents panel's verdicts, vote splits and quoted reasoning are third-party journalism. They are published by ESPN and the BBC, who obtained them; RefCard structures, prices and attributes them, and cites each incident to its source article. That structuring is ours and is covered above. The verdicts and any quoted wording are not. If you want to republish those, go to the publisher.
Underlying match statistics — scores, fouls, cards, events — come from third-party data feeds under their own terms. RefCard cannot sublicense them. Our compilation and derived figures are what CC BY covers.
We hold no relationship with the Premier League or Pro Ref, and nothing here is official.
Why we state this at all
A stated licence is what makes attribution expected rather than optional. We benefit from that ourselves: the open-data releases this project has learned from carry explicit terms, and we credit them because those terms asked us to. This is the same courtesy, pointed outward.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong we would rather know than not. Every number is derived from a stated method and is meant to be checkable; where the data cannot support a claim, the site says so instead of estimating.