How to reform refereeing and bring back free speech in football

 

 

 

 

• Do Arsenal really get twice as many red cards as other clubs?
• How some clubs are still in a total mess with the new financial rules (although not Arsenal)

Prelude: A million apologies for Untold going down yet again this morning.  We really are trying to find the bug in the system, but as yet….

By Tony Attwood

In a recent interview the Leicester manager Steve Cooper announced, “I’d get fined if I said how I felt about the referee after Leicester’s defeat.”

No journalist picked up on the point to ask, “Why would he be fined?”  Or indeed why is free speech, which is so (quite rightly in my view) so widely revered in the UK as a fundamental part of our way of life, not extended to managers commenting on referees?

After all the rest of us can, and will do it.  And managers in other countries do it.  What makes referees in England so precious that they must be protected?

We might ask the same question about PGMO, the referees’ organisation, which we learned this season, is now financially done in and ready for administration.  Why is no one in the media asking, if an organisation that is a monopoly supplier of a service that is required 92 football clubs under their constitution, in financial difficulty?  What incompetence is this? 

Since PGMO’s income is not dependent on their performance, nor on the crowds in the ground, nor on the TV audience, nor on anyone;’s view of how they do how can any such organisation be this incompetent?

And maybe that is the question that should be considered.  Not how can PGMO be reformed in order to make it financially viable?  But rather, “Why can’t we have a competent organisation running refereeing?”

If we did have competence we might also reform the whole refereeing secrecy nonsense and, like Germany, introduce post-match TV interviews for referees.  TV would pay a lot for those, and that in turn would allow PGMO to recruit and train up more match officials so that in due course it could reach the mighty heights of balance that Untold has asked for, for so long.  In short, no referee should oversee a match involving a Premier League club more than once at the club’s home ground and once at an away ground.  The five Arsenal games a season for some refs would stop.

So three birds with one stone – the referees have to explain themselves, they have their chances of affecting a club’s league position by restricting them to just two games a season for each club, and the PGMO earns more money.

And now here is a second option: abandon the monopoly position of PGMO.   By and large, our society is against monopoly suppliers.  We still do have a few but not many, and there is no reason why refereeing should be in the hands of a monopoly supplier.  If we had several organisations running refereeing then they could be judged by their cost-effectiveness, including how happy or unhappy clubs were with their performances.

Of course, it might then be argued that the clubs would give high marks when they got away with something and low marks if the ref gave a penalty against them.   But there could also be a review of how clubs rate referees by an independent tribunal and any club seen to be making ludicrous complaints could be removed from the process for a year.

Obviously it is not only referees and the notorious journalist-protected PGMO that do silly things in football.  If you want another example one need look no further than Manchester United.  In one sense they are not doing too bad having come second, third (twice), sixth (twice) and eighth, while also winning the domestic cups in the last six seasons.

But the belief in the club that they have an absolute right to win the league most of the time clearly dictates that is not enough, and the Guardian is now speaking of “just how atrocious their side had been all season” and “demonstrably the worst side to call Old Trafford home in nearly 30 years.”

Here we have not just expectation, but also a sense of entitlement, which is now that what Manchester City also brings to the table (in their case entitlement that they can do what they like).

Those of us with long-running Arsenal season tickets have enjoyed the utter highs of the unbeaten season, and indeed I would say the record number of FA Cup wins by any manager, and by any club, but we have also been there through the two consecutive finishing of eighth in the league. 

Between 1990 and last season Manchester United had only once finished outside the top six – before last season’s collapse to eighth.  And emulating Arsenal of 2020 (when we finished 88th and won the FA Cup) the supporters are now demanding a rapid rise up the league.   Instead they are currently 14th.

I suspect they will ultimately pull themselves together but it doesn’t do the supporters any harm to remember that no club has a right to be in the top league (although Manchester City now clearly do believe they do have – or at least that is how I interpret their legal action against the league).  Just because Arsenal have been in the top league since 1919, does not mean that Arsenal have that by right – rather it is by managing to avoid being relegated and having a consistent view of reality.

Perhaps another year in the Championship as Man U had in the 1970s might help bring some reality back to those Manchester United supporters – wherever they happen to live.