How many yellow cards will be given out at the EURO?

By 2020, the number of yellow cards at the European Championship will have decreased by more than one compared to 2016. What can we expect now?

Of the many outright markets in the European Championship, the yellow and red card markets are always particularly heart-warming for me. This time around, we can bet on Vegas to see how many cautions the 51 matches will bring, and now we’ll take a look at our options for the yellows.

It will hardly depend on the referees

Needless to say, the European Championship has once again gathered an extremely experienced team, and there are few referees whose selection would come as a surprise – well, maybe Marco Guida’s invitation is a bit unexpected.

In István Kovács, Danny Makkelie, Michael Oliver, Daniele Orsato, Daniel Siebert, Artur Soares Dias, Anthony Taylor, Slavko Vincic and Clmément Turpin, there are nine referees who have been to the ’20 tournament. Another Italian, Daniele Orsato, is preparing for the last games of his career, so a true legend will be saying goodbye, while, as in 2020, there is also an Argentinean skipper. Fernando Rapallini, who picked up 12 yellow cards in three games, didn’t really shine.

This year’s tournament will see Facundo Tello arrive from South America, while Maurizio Mariani will be “replacing him” at the Copa.

Whoever talks gets a yellow card

For this year’s European Championship, UEFA is introducing a rule change on communication with referees. As Roberto Rosetti, the organisation’s head of refereeing, explains, it is important to have mutual, respectful communication from both sides.

“We want referees with strong personalities who can make even unpopular decisions on the pitch, but we also want them to be more open and explain what led them to make certain decisions. They get a lot of information from the assistant video referee (VAR) and we are ready to talk and share more details with the players and coaches to help them understand how a certain decision was made,” said Rosetti.

In practice, only the team captain on the pitch will be able to ask the referee to explain his decision. It will be the responsibility of the referee to ensure that his team-mates respect the rules, otherwise the offending player will be cautioned.

In our opinion this will be an important factor, with a new rule it is easy for referees to want to set an example during their first games, so it may be wise to think about this in the first round of the group stage.

What does history say?

The 2020 European Championship produced a relatively small number of 151 yellow cards, which gave an average of 2.96 per game, compared to 205 and 4.02 in 2016, a massive drop, which doesn’t make it easy to guess.

In my opinion, the refereeing is not necessarily moving towards 10-12 card games and this referee corps has a huge amount of respect and experience. I see a continuation of the trend from the tournament three years ago, which of course doesn’t mean there won’t be some extremely tough matches. But on this borderline I think the value is more in the under.