VAR is not the question of the day: there is something much, much bigger

 

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by Tony Attwood

There was a headline in the New York Times (of all places!) recently, which read, Arsenal fans: Should your club vote to scrap VAR?

And reading that I thought, wow, the referees’ association PGMO must be utterly, utterly thrilled to read that.   Because if that is the big issue of the day, it means that the two biggest key issues in football that concern me (the way PGMO runs refereeing in the Premier League, and the 115 charges against Manchester City) have been totally and utterly swept under the carpet.  The campaigns of silence have been a success.

But in fact only one of those issues, (PGMO) has failed to make it into the media.  The other one is flourishing (although not quite yet in every media outlet).

To get the PGMO dealt with first, the problem with it is that it is a secret organisation whose secrecy is respected by the media (whose journalists are, I suspect, told that serious investigations into PGMO will lead to their entry to the media suite in football grounds being rescinded.  I’ve no evidence of that, it is just the only reason I can think of as to why the media won’t touch PGMO).

Of course, I have no evidence that PGMO is a corrupt organisation, but I do ask the question, if PGMO is not corrupt in any way why does it not have a website where it can discuss issues of the day?  Why does it so rigidly not allow referees to discuss matters from games on TV, as happens in Germany?   In short why is it so utterly secretive, and perhaps above all else, why does the media go along with this?

Thus we don’t get any discussion on how one referee oversees lots of home wins, and another oversees lots of away wins.  Nor of the variety of the number of cards the referees give out.   And if none of this matters, why doesn’t someone come out and say so?

Well, of course Untold comes out and says so, but we’re just a blog supporting one team so are easy to ignore.  But… just occasionally (not often but occasionally) we cover a story and make a bit of a fuss, and then a little later out of the blue, a part of the media that hasn’t touched the story for a very long time, pops up and deals with it, immediately after we have done so.

And of course each occasion of this can always be dismissed as a coincidence, and that I don’t mind.  Or the reply can be made that the media were dealing with it anyway.   I’m never going to convince anyone who doesn’t believe it that Untold has had an effect.   But I do note these occasional moments.

And thus we come to the headline in the Telegraph today that reads “Man City will become greatest Premier League side, but 115 charges are inescapable.”

And that’s not all because yesterday the Metro, out of the blue ran “What are the 115 charges against Man City and why haven’t they been punished?”

Sports Bible popped up with Update on Man City’s 115 FFP charges as Sky News reporter reveals what the Premier League ‘has indicated’.”

And Football.London, never one to be left out of the way the mood is swinging, gave us “Man City face £355m FFP setback as Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham ‘could get’ prize money” adding that “All three major London clubs could be entitled to serious prize money remuneration if Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City are found guilty of breaching financial regulations.”

I should also add that there is a video on the internet that says Manchester City have “got away with it” and they have been found not guilty.    Such videos suggest the opposite of what most commentators are reporting and are put up, as far as I know, just so that people click on the video and take the video maker up the charts in terms of numbers of hits.  Believe them if you wish, but they present no credible evidence.

But there is one key point we must always note is that when Uefa and CAS investigated Manchester City, the club was let off only because Uefa took too long to present the case, and so the case was “time barred”.  This is often presented now as Manchester City being found not guilty – which is only partially true – they were not guilty on the technicality of time taken to present the case.

And virtually none of the media has since raised the question, how could Uefa be so grossly incompetent as to present such an important case so late that it was thrown out on a technicality?

Fortunately, the Premier League learned from this case, and there is no time-limit clause within the league’s rules concerning investigating Manchester City’s alleged activities. 

None of the commentaries in the last couple of days that I have seen have yet gone on to speculate what might happen if Manchester City are found innocent or guilty on only a few peripheral charges.  That’s perhaps a step too far for the media, so we’ve still got that concept to ourselves, at least for the moment.  I suspect that the rest of the league will be so outraged they will do what they did back on 20 February 1992, which is when they resigned from the Football League and formed a new league of their own.

And of course as many will always say, “its just a coincidence” that the media have suddenly started to talk about Manchester C and the charges against them again,  and if it is I don’t mind.  I just want people to be aware, to talk about it, and then think, “hang on, shouldn’t something be happening?”