The personality of referees, and why PGMO is so determined to stay secret

 

• How have the London clubs been doing this season?
• Arsenal are only six goals away from being top of the league

By Tony Attwood

Here’s an interesting question: which organisation manages to govern and control WITHOUT being in the news at all?

Put another way, which organisation has no megaphone and indeed no website and yet runs the show?   The answer of course is the ultra-secret PGMO which runs refereeing in the Premier League.   

In a way we can see PGMO as the opposite of Donald Trump.  Trump needs to be in the news every day, but as  Guardian points out  America’s experience of Trump will ultimately “expose him for what he is: a confidence trickster” the PGMO has gone in the opposite direction.  For they have become the most secret of secret societies.  An organisation that allows one of its regular referees (John Brooks) to oversee 69% of his games as home wins, while Anthony Taylor sees 56% as away wins.

In both the cases of Trump and PGMO asking “how can this happen?” is a very valid and interesting question.  I won’t try and answer it concerning Trump, but in football PGMO can get away with what they do because many football journalists and commentators appear to be narcissists. – and I write “appear to be” as obviously I can only judge them by what they write; I don’t have any personal contact with them.

Now narcissism involves having a view that suggests one has enormous self-importance, along with a lack of understanding of others.  A belief in fact that one is always right, and as a result deserving of special treatment.

And in one sense Donald Trump and PGMO referees have a right to such narcissism since each holds a unique position – Premier League referees because they are part of an ultra-secretive group, answerable to no one and explaining themselves to no one, and Trump because he can, and in fact does, do what he likes.  Even if it means changing his mind twice a day on every topic.

But narcissists have one gigantic problem: they have a tendency to exaggerate their own achievements and through this build up their importance, believing that they actually are superior to all around them.  Trump clearly does this – and in one sense has a right to do this, since he got the most votes in an election for President.   PGMO and its referees can do this because the media won’t ever question what they do.

And yet narcissists can have a problem because they desire something more: admiration.  But they generally end up feeling ostracised (for more on this see the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology),

What the detailed research suggests is that these people have a need for dominance plus a feeling of entitlement, as well as having a great wish to be admired.   And in the case both of professional referees and the President of the United States we can see why they have their sense of entitlement.   Indeed it can also explain why PGMO deliberately keeps the number of referees so low that the same referees see the top teams over and over again.

For if the PGMO referees never saw the same team more than twice in a season, much of his sense of entitlement would be whisked away. 

But it is also a fact that many people with these traits want to be at the centre of the show, and yet because of their personalities, they are often ostracised.  As a result of which by making the decision to remove themselves from the rest of football, they then remove the option for football to ostracise them.  It’s like a bunch of children in which the gang tells one kid that they don’t want him in their gang, to which he replies “I don’t want to be in your gang anyway.”  For children read Premier League referees.

Narcissistic people have personalities which in fact lead to them being shunned by others – which then undoubtedly draws some of them to become referees, a job in which being shunned by others is part of the trade. 

In fact most people don’t want to work with or be friends with narcissistic people – since narcissists are people with an inflated sense of self-importance, a need for admiration and a lack of empathy with others.

This in turn explains fully why PGMO shun all publicity, have no website, escort referees to and from matches with specially designated drivers, and do not allow them to talk to the media.   And as psychological research regularly shows, people don’t like working with narcissists – so they become ever more inward-looking.

Indeed research has also shown that most of us don’t care for narcissists very much, not least because of their habit of derogating others in order to protect “their own grandiose self-image”.

But the PGMO’s secrecy and the deliberate ostracism of referees through their refusal to engage in interviews etc actually makes their narcissism worse, and then makes them ever more likely to be excluded from other events – hence the referees’ willingness to accept the PGMO rule of no contact with the media and indeed much of the outside world.

In short removing referees from the everyday debate on football such as not making them available for interview tends to make them even more narcissistic.

The original research into narcissists and ostracism is by Büttner, C. M., Rudert, S. C., Albath, E. A., Sibley, C. G., & Greifeneder, R. (2025). Narcissists’ experience of ostracism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.