Mike Dean says he used to make a private game of refereeing Premier League matches: kick off, then see how long he could go without blowing his whistle. He told Jamie Vardy’s podcast he had managed 20 to 25 minutes on several occasions. His account invites supporters to wonder whether decisions affecting their teams were being passed up for a referee’s amusement.

West Bromwich Albion’s 1–0 win over Manchester United on 6 March 2016 has duly been put forward as evidence. Dean went nearly 19 minutes from kick-off before the first counted stoppage. Less than seven minutes later, he had sent off Juan Mata.

It is easy to see why that sequence attracts attention. It does not establish that Dean was playing games with the match.

The opening spell lasted 18 minutes 48 seconds. Dean played advantage at 1:35, 16:15 and 18:12. There were also ten throw-ins, a corner and two goal kicks. The ball was going out and coming back in; Dean was making decisions to let play continue after offences. Those timings alone do not show whether his decisions were influenced by a private challenge.

Mata’s bookings followed at 23:00 and 25:29, the first for obstructing Darren Fletcher’s quick free kick, the second for tripping him. Louis van Gaal called the first a “stupid yellow card”, while arguing that Dean should have taken Mata’s character into account. It is not reasonable to expect a referee to take character references before issuing a yellow card.

Those were specific incidents requiring decisions. Their timing does not show that Dean had suddenly become strict after spending the opening spell protecting a personal record. That would require showing that Dean had played advantage when he should have stopped play. The data and timings alone cannot do that.

What they can do is show us whether the 18:48 gap was abnormal. Examining the recorded stoppages in all 380 matches of the 2015/16 Premier League season, including the 33 Dean refereed, puts the West Brom opening into context. How unusual it was depends on how we read his claim.

Taken literally, going without blowing his whistle means more than going without awarding a foul. Cards, offsides, substitutions, injury stoppages, dropped balls and goals also matter. These are included in the broader measure, labelled “Any stoppage”.

A more charitable reading is that Dean meant going without awarding a free kick or penalty for a foul. That is the narrower measure, labelled “Free kick or penalty”. A gap between foul-related stoppages can still contain an offside, a substitution or a goal. Other interruptions do not count against him.

Both measures use recorded stoppages to estimate the gaps. Neither includes routine throw-ins, corners or goal kicks, so twenty minutes does not mean twenty minutes of uninterrupted football.

Under the literal measure, only four of the season’s 380 matches contained a gap of at least 20 minutes. Under the foul-related measure, 19 did. Twenty minutes between foul-related stoppages was uncommon in any given match, but most regular referees encountered it during the season: 12 of the 14 who handled at least ten matches.

Dean was among those 12. His longest gap between foul-related stoppages was 20:33, at Swansea City against Aston Villa on 19 March. That put him eleventh of the 14 regular referees. West Brom, the supposed smoking gun, was only his third-longest by this measure.

West Brom was his longest, ranking sixth among the regular referees’ season maxima. Martin Atkinson reached 25:49 from kick-off in Manchester United against Chelsea on 28 December 2015. That interval contained 25 throw-ins, corners and goal kicks.

Dean’s failure to reach 20 minutes under the broader measure in one season cannot disprove an anecdote about his pre-VAR career. Nothing can. Equally, reaching it between foul-related stoppages does not substantiate his claim to have engineered a grand corruption of English football. Most of his regular colleagues reached that duration too. The comparison gives us no reason to treat a long gap as evidence of a private game.

Dean subsequently said he had always applied the laws to the best of his ability, preferred a high threshold for contact and acted when a challenge required it. That is a reasonable description of letting a match flow. It leaves his claim about playing games for amusement unexplained. Dean’s statement.

His story remains unconvincing, and he should know what supporters will hear in it. Every advantage can be recast as a foul ignored to keep his game going; every later booking as the moment he decided to resume work. The West Brom timings establish neither accusation.

The officials still doing the job should not have to carry the suspicion Dean’s stories create. Looking at the numbers, the only place he has ever gone twenty minutes without stopping is behind a microphone.