The problem with referees is not the refs: it is PGMOL

By Tony Attwood

“PGMOL is bleeding money”.   That is the official story of Professional Game Match Officials Ltd and it is dutifully reproduced in the Daily Telegraph today.    It is apparently about to announce “new losses next week of £900,000” while “losses of £379,000 last year have been adjusted upwards to £1.8 million, taking the cumulative total over three years to around £3.4 million.”  But apparently it is not their fault.

But then it never is.

So let’s consider this.  PGMOL is a limited company (which is what the L stands for, and why we often call them PGMO; there’s no need for the Ltd to be mentioned just as we don’t say Arsenal plc).    As such the directors of the company have an absolute obligation under UK law to run the company profitably.  If they don’t, and they know that the company will ultimately not be able to meet its debts, they have to put the company into liquidation.  Not to do so is an offence.

Now you might think that this is the big issue for PGMO (take the L as read from here on) – for without a resolution to their catastrophic financial situation, there is no way forward for them.  But no, instead they are talking about relegating some referees from the Premier League into the Football League.

Of course having watched those referees, and seen how differently Arsenal is treated from other clubs, and how referees differ in their approach – some perceiving twice as many fouls in a game as others, some handing out twice as many cards in a game as other – you might expect them to be focussing on such issues.

But no, they are saying nothing about the catastrophic differences between one referee and the next.  Instead they are just asking for more money!!!

Now I chaired a plc for many years, as I have mentioned before – and I mention this neither to gain sympathy nor to boast, but to suggest that I do know a bit about how companies operate. 

And I know that PGMOL are going around saying there are very few errors on the pitch each week.  But to believe that, we have to accept that by pure chance, week after week, referee Robert Jones sees 25 fouls in each match he oversees while referee Simon Hooper sees just over 20 fouls.    Both refs have overseen 20 or more PL games this season which means that in his first 20 games, Jones saw 500 fouls but Hooper only saw 400.  Either Jones made 100 up, or Hooper really didn’t have his glasses on.

Here’s another one.  In 29 games Anthony Taylor waved 83 yellow cards.  But in his 15 games John Brooks waved 80 cards.  So as many cards but in half the number of games! As you can see, how many cards a club gets relates to which ref the club gets.

Worse, the refs keep seeing the same clubs over and over again, rather than having a rule that each ref can only see each club twice in a season.

So why won’t the league agree to pay PGMOL a bit more to employ more referees?   At the moment they only have 17 referees who take ten or more PL games a season.  Answer: because they aren’t paid enough.

Clearly Arsenal would benefit from there being more referees so some of these refs who, as our earlier figures showed, give Arsenal a very hard time of it, can’t penalise Arsenal so often..  But equally clearly there are many clubs who are benefitting from this current system, able to get themselves the soft touch referees, which they keep their number of cards down.

As a result of this we have referee figures such  as

If referees were all running their games in the same way, these enormous variances in figures would not occur.   But as it is with any of those five referees, you almost know the result before you start – and that cannot be right.