Europa League Referee Card Stats 2026/27

If you are pricing a card market in the Europa League, the number almost everyone uses is wrong, because it comes from a domestic league. Get that prior wrong and you will back unders all season at odds that look generous and are not: Europa League referee card stats run roughly a third of a yellow above the Champions League and nearly a full card above the Eredivisie, and the over 4.5 line clears here almost half the time. This guide gives you the competition baseline, the per official table, and the one comparison no public source makes: what the same referee does in Europe against what they do at home. The figures come from our own dataset of 540 Europa League matches across the 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons, recomputed from per fixture records rather than copied, covering 2,279 yellow cards and 125 reds shown by 152 officials. Four matchdays of the 2026/27 league phase have been played, with Matchday 5 on 26 November 2026, so treat this as the prior you carry into the rest of the campaign rather than a read on this season.

The Europa League card baseline

Here is the whole profile in one place. Every figure is a match level aggregate computed across all 540 matches, so none of it depends on which official a given game is attributed to.

The line to commit to memory is over 4.5 cards at 45 per cent. Nearly one Europa League match in two produces five cards or more. The both teams booked rate of 76 per cent is the other number worth carrying: in three matches out of four, each side picks up at least one caution.

Half splits and foul counts appear at all because this competition is sourced from per fixture event records rather than season end summaries. Several domestic leagues in our dataset carry no half split for that reason, as our methodology page sets out.

Europa League cards against every competition we hold

A baseline on its own is just a number. Here is the Europa League beside every competition for which we hold minute level records, each with its own window stated, because the windows are not the same length and pretending otherwise is how bad comparisons get made.

Two things stand out. First, the Europa League cards more freely than the Champions League, 4.22 yellows against 3.93, and the gap widens on the over lines: 62 per cent against 56 per cent at over 3.5. That is the opposite of the usual assumption, which is that the bigger competition is the tenser one.

Second, the Europa League sits mid table on raw card rate while the Primeira Liga and La Liga top it. If you want the cross league picture in full, our guide on which league has the most cards covers it, and over 4.5 cards hit rates works through the break even odds at every line. The sibling guide to this one, Champions League referee card stats, carries the same treatment for the other European competition.

A card every 4.2 fouls, the quickest whistle in the dataset

This is the finding I did not expect. The Europa League whistles fewer fouls than any competition in the dataset, 18.8 per game, and still shows more cards than all but two of them. Put those together and you get a card every 4.2 fouls, where every other competition needs at least five.

The World Cup is the instructive opposite end: 23.5 fouls a game and a card only every 7.7 of them. A Europa League referee, facing fewer fouls, books a far higher share of them.

Why it matters for a bet: fouls are the number you can see live and cards are the number you are pricing. Read a Europa League tie off its foul count and you will underrate it, because the conversion here is roughly 25 per cent quicker than in the Champions League. The reverse trap is worse: a clean, low foul Europa League match is not evidence of a low card match, because low foul counts are the norm here rather than a signal.

A caution reflects the referee judging an offence reckless, persistent or unsporting, and the Laws of the Game set out those categories rather than any threshold. The pool is what varies, which is the next section.

Europa League referee card stats: the full table

Below are the 41 officials with six or more Europa League matches on record, covering 311 of the 540 matches. Six is the cut off because this competition spreads its work thinly: 152 officials from 43 countries appear in the data and 61 of them worked exactly one match. Those officials are counted in every aggregate above and excluded here, because a rate off one game is noise.

The spread is the point. Andris Treimanis averages 84.4 booking points against Rade Obrenovic on 27.1, a factor of 3.1 inside one competition, and the over 4.5 column runs from 88 per cent down to 14 per cent. That is a far bigger difference than any team based read you are likely to have, and it is knowable before kick off.

Treimanis shows 7.50 yellows a game and booked both sides in every one of his eight matches. Nick Walsh is the other extreme, 5.89 yellows and 0.667 reds a game, a dismissal every match and a half. At the mild end, Mykola Balakin averages 2.33 yellows across six matches and Obrenovic has shown no red at all in seven.

Read the match counts before leaning on any row. Eight matches is a real sample for a ranking and a thin one for a price: 88 per cent over 4.5 rests on seven matches out of eight, and one quiet game moves it to 78. Our guide on how referee stats win card bets sets out how much weight an appointment deserves, and the full per official view, including those below the cut off, is on the Europa League referee hub.

The same official, two very different rates

Here is the comparison no public source makes. The aggregator sites that rank referees publish career averages across all competitions, or a Europa League rate off two matches. Neither answers the question you want answered: does this official card differently in Europe than at home? Four officials here have a domestic record long enough to tell you, 100 matches or more.

All four card more in the Europa League, by an average of +1.49 yellows per game. Chris Kavanagh shows 3.52 yellows across 193 Premier League matches and 5.60 across ten Europa League ones. Anthony Taylor, on the largest domestic sample at 432 matches, moves from 3.51 to 4.57.

The European side of each pair is small, so treat the size of each gap as provisional. The direction is robust, and a second cut of the same data reinforces it: 13 of 17 officials who worked both European competitions with usable samples card more in the Europa League than in the Champions League. 83 of the 152 officials here also appear in our Champions League data, so this is largely one referee pool behaving differently in two competitions.

The upshot: do not carry a referee's domestic card rate into a Europa League tie unadjusted. On this evidence it understates them by somewhere between half a card and two cards a game. Whether that is the referee, the fixtures or unfamiliar opponents, aggregates cannot separate, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Turning the baseline into a price

A hit rate becomes useful the moment you turn it into odds. Fair odds are simply one divided by the probability, before any margin, so they are the number a price has to beat before the bet is worth taking.

Those are competition wide figures, so they are the prior you adjust rather than the final number: start at 2.20 for over 4.5 cards, then move for the official. A Treimanis appointment is not a 45 per cent shot at that line and neither is an Obrenovic one.

Two cautions. The hit rates come from completed seasons, so they are a competition baseline and not a forecast of a particular tie. And a bookmaker's price carries a margin, so a quoted 2.20 on over 4.5 cards is not a fair price, it is roughly the fair price with the edge removed. Our guides on booking points and how card markets are priced cover both, including why the booking points market often prices an official better than the card count market does.

Two thirds of the cards arrive after the break

Two thirds of the cards in this competition, 66 per cent, are shown after half time against 34 per cent before it. That is not unusual, since every competition for which we hold minute data sits between 63 and 68 per cent, but it tells you what a quiet first half means.

At a competition average of 4.45 cards, about 1.5 arrive in the first half and 3.0 in the second, so a first half with one card is on schedule rather than under it. Trading in play, the first half line is where the cheap overs tend to sit.

The away side takes 54 per cent of Europa League cards against 46 per cent for the home side, the same direction and roughly the same size as every competition we measure. On 4.45 cards that is about 2.4 away against 2.0 home, a real edge in a head to head card market and not enough to carry a bet alone. Our guide on referee home bias and away team cards works through the mechanism, including how the gap collapsed during the closed doors season.

The one number on this page we will not publish

Our dataset holds a penalty count for this competition and we are not publishing it, because it is wrong. Here is the evidence rather than a quietly dropped column, because a penalty rate is exactly the sort of number that gets copied once it is in print.

The pattern is the first clue. Every knockout competition sits above every pure league: the Europa League on 0.422 and the Champions League on 0.432 against 0.181 to 0.339 for the leagues, with the World Cup highest on 0.548. Competitions that go to shootouts read high. Competitions that do not read normally.

The per official figures settle it. 9 officials are credited with more than one penalty per match, which is close to impossible over any real sample. One is credited with ten penalties in a single match, which is a shootout, not a match. Another is credited with 37 across ten matches. At the same time 71 of the 152 officials are recorded with exactly zero. That is not a noisy measurement, it is a count of the wrong thing.

So the penalty column stays with the maintainer until the ingestion separates shootout kicks from penalties awarded in play. A wrong rate is worse than no rate, because it looks exactly as authoritative as a right one. Every other figure on this page comes from card and foul counts, which are unaffected.

One related caveat, in the same spirit. The source feed sometimes supplies a name in initial form, and 30 entities here carry one, covering 43 of 540 matches. One is a genuine split: Radu Marian Petrescu appears on four matches and an initialled variant on three. Both sit below the six match cut off, so the table above is unaffected, and we leave an uncertain pair unmerged rather than guess.

What the 2026/27 rule changes do to card markets

Two changes took effect for 2026/27 and both touch card markets. Neither is reflected in the figures above, which end with the 2025/26 season.

The suspension threshold moved from three yellow cards to four. In circular 51/2026, dated 4 August 2026, UEFA amended Article 63.02 of the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League regulations so that, from the first league phase match, a player is suspended after four yellow cards rather than three, then after each subsequent even numbered booking, the sixth and the eighth. The qualifying rounds keep the old threshold of three. UEFA's stated reason is arithmetic: the league phase grew from six matches to eight in 2024/25, raising suspension risk without anyone intending it, and the change restores the original ratio. The regulation text is in Article 63.

Why a card bettor should care: a player on three yellows used to be a player who could not afford a fourth, and now has a booking in hand. The effect is small, and it runs toward slightly more cautions late in the league phase rather than fewer.

VAR can now cancel a second yellow. UEFA's refereeing guidance for this season confirms that clearly incorrectly awarded second yellow cards can be reviewed, with the referee invited to an on field review and the card cancelled. That is a one way valve: it can remove a second booking and cannot add one. The same guidance sets out that covering the mouth to conceal communication may be cautioned as unsporting behaviour rather than treated as a red card offence, and that breaching the captain only protocol may itself draw a yellow. Our VAR stats guide covers how reviews feed through to card counts.

What to watch across the rest of the league phase

Matchday 4 was played on 5 November 2026. Matchday 5 follows on 26 November and Matchday 6 on 10 December, with Matchdays 7 and 8 on 21 and 28 January 2027, the knockout play offs on 18 and 25 February, the round of 16 in March, and the final at Stadion Frankfurt on 26 May 2027. UEFA notes that dates may change. Three questions follow.

Does the league phase card differently from the knockout rounds? Our sample pools both, so we cannot separate them yet. If the league phase runs materially below 4.22 and the knockout rounds above it, a single competition prior is doing too much work.

Does the four yellow threshold show up in the data? It is the one change this season with a clean mechanism behind it, and the place to look is Matchdays 6 to 8, where accumulation used to bite.

Does the foul to card conversion hold? A card every 4.2 fouls is the most distinctive thing about this competition, and the easiest to lose if UEFA's instruction on faster restarts changes what gets whistled at all.

Every figure here is recomputed from match records, so the tables move as new fixtures are ingested. For the method and its limits, see our methodology.

Figures cover 540 Europa League matches in the RefOdds dataset from the 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons, last ingested 2 July 2026. Nothing from the 2026/27 league phase is included. The pool of 152 officials averages under four matches each and spans 43 countries, so the sample covers the competition as a whole, including ties outside the league phase, rather than the league phase alone. Match level aggregates use all 540 matches; the per official table is limited to the 41 officials with six or more, covering 311 matches. Domestic comparison figures are each official's record in their own league in our dataset, shown with its match count. Booking points use the yellow equals 10, red equals 25 model on our methodology page. Recorded penalty counts for knockout competitions are excluded as unreliable. Nothing here is betting advice.