By Tony Attwood
The one thing we know about PGMO, is that we don’t know much about the organisation that employs and hires out referees to the Premier League.. PGMO is ultra-secretive; so secretive in fact that it doesn’t have a website, forbids its referees from talking about matches or approaches, and fails at every level of communication with either fans or the media in any way.
But now we know something else: it is in trouble.
Curiously the media respect the secrecy of PGMO so much that even this huge story is not making the headlines in most of the media, and of course PGMO won’t talk or explain, even when it is the story.
But its problem is not just the fact that some of us think it would be helpful to understand more about PGMO and be able to check that the refs are doing their job properly that is important. It is, as we have shown and will continue to show, that which referee a club gets in a game has a major impact on how the results go.
To put it bluntly if Arsenal are playing a team that fouls at lot we want David Coote as referee. He’ll call the fouls and hands out the yellows. If the feeling is that we’ll need a penalty to break down a defence, then having Michael Salisbury running the show is a good idea – he hands them out far more than most referees.
If Arsenal are a home Robert Jones is the man for the game – two thirds of his games are home wins. But if we are away you can’t do better than Jarred Gillett…
Of course it shouldn’t be like this, but it is; hence the PGMO’s total ban on publicity. What they do does not bear scrutiny.
And with this lunatic situation, it is not surprising to find that PGMO not only don’t know how to run refereeing, they also don’t know how to run their own finances, for they are on the edge of going bust .
As anyone who has even a small part in running a business, planning is everything. If you just keep on doing what you did yesterday in the belief that everything around you will stay the same, you will fail. But that is what PGMO has done. According to reports from their normally docile and compliant pals in the media PGMO, “reserves have fallen to almost zero” and their “Training programme under threat without more cash”.
Now companies can run into financial difficulty – most particularly when markets change. You make or sell a product that people stop wanting, and you are in trouble. That’s capitalism.
But this doesn’t apply to football. The need for referees is constant, the league is still there, and in fact more and more referees are needed for VAR and other semi-fictional inventions. And the market is growing as PGMO referees now work overseas and are doing all the video work.
So just how utterly incompetent do you have to be to run an organisation of which you are the monopoly supplier, and then run out of money?
I would say 100% incompetent. Or in the case of PGMO, possibly more.
Now the point here is that PGMO is paid for by the clubs, and clearly it can simply put its prices up. So how could it possibly run out of cash?
Two possible reasons come to mind. One is that just as it is incapable of ensuring that referees all relate to the rules of the game in the same way they are incapable of basic bookkeeping. The other is that the clubs are refusing to pay PGMO more per game until PGMO actually starts running itself properly.
And “properly” means upping the level of training so we get rid of this stupid current situation where we have “home win” refs and “away win refs”. Another would be to increase the number of referees so that NO CLUB has the same referee oversee the club more than twice in a season (which would reduce manyfeelings of bias).
A third would be to allow referees to engage with the media and thus force them to explain themselves, in return for suitable media fees.
So are PGMO getting into these discussions? Seemingly no. So utterly fanatical are they about their secrecy that they are simply demanding the clubs pay them more per game, without any change to the way they work!
As for what has got PGMO into this mess: the Guardian tells us. it has “been spending more than its budget in recent years as costs have risen,.” Well! After a lifetime in business myself I have to say I have never realised that could be an an issue. That you must only spend what you are getting in income! Well I never! Who’d have thought it?
And what do the rest of us do when we have this crisis? We offer more and charge more. So all PGMO has to do is to say that each club will only see each referee twice in a season in order to reduce bias, that training will improve again in order to reduce bias, that constant statistical reviews will be put in place again in order to reduce bias, and referees will be allowed to talk to the media in order to increase income.
At the same time as doing this they could also get rid of the ludicrous (and mostly not reported) geographic bias that the referees show. As even the Guardian admits, “With the exception of the Australian Jarred Gillett, the vast majority of the rest of the Premier League referees are from Yorkshire and the north-west.”
They keep that quiet, but now even the Guardian (a long term pal of PGMO, never known to criticise its way of working) is admitting it, so maybe change could be on the way.
Off topic about the CL draw:
The new 36-team format of the competition means we will no longer play all these opponents home and away, and so we’ll be hosting PSG, Shakhtar, Zagreb and Monaco at Emirates Stadium, while trips to Milan, Atalanta, Lisbon and Girona will be in our near future.
Not a bad draw. PSG looks like the only problem. Tony, I firmly believe the PGMO is too dumb to fix itself and the Premier League is equally dumb to not realize that.
Interesting timing of that Guardian article. Rebecca Welch retired from officiating today. Having seen some of her performances in Arsenal WSL matches over the years, I won’t be shedding any tears.
The competence of the PGMO is at a level of most of the institutions in the UK today from our new pygmies in parliament, civil service, local councils, justice system, police & all the quangos we have.
Those competent for the public sector give it a wide berth. And the PGMO although a private organisation acts 100% as a public sector organisation.
Nothing but a revolution will change these deeply intrenched organisations which PGMO are part of.