By Tony Attwood
- How football is following the lead of Mohamed Al-Fayed
- How one manipulative malevolent interview has re-energised the media hatred of Arsenal
On 10 October last year the Mirror ran the bold headling “Howard Webb urged to issue ban on referees after Arsenal vs Man City incident”. On October 11 another headline read “PGMOL chief Howard Webb warned to stop referees officiating games in Saudi Arabia & UAE.”
And this shocked football because the media has a general agreement with the Premier League and PGMO not to focus on referees. But for a moment the media broke that deal, and the story bout referees freelancing outside England, became big news.
“Webb has got himself in a tangle” over the topic The New York Times told us late the same month. And of course we covered this with our piece The clearest exposition yet that there is something very wrong with refereeing
So what happened? In December 2023 Goal ran the story “Premier League referees to continue working abroad despite huge Darren England blunder over Luis Diaz goal in Tottenham-Liverpool clash”.
At first there was an attempt to play down the impact of referees working in Saudi with claims that “PGMOL found no link in the VAR error and travel to Saudi,” and “Each request will be weighed based on the merit.”
That was quite a change – the refs had to make a “request” to work in Saudi. Then the Telegraph reeported that “Howard Webb under pressure to stop letting referees work in Saudi Arabia.” And then dead silence. The refs, it seemed had almost totally stopped working in Saudi.
Until we heard the news that “Premier League faces calls to increase funding for cash-strapped PGMOL” with further reports that “Referees’ body’s reserves have fallen to almost zero” and “Training programme under threat without more cash.”
So several giant quetions arose – the biggest of which
First, did Saudi Arabia stop using Premier League referees? The answer seems to be yes. Did PL refs then demand more money from PGMO to compensate for this loss of earnings? The answers seems to be yes. Did PGMO have the money to pay the referees extra? The answer seems to be no. Finally, did the media, which was so utterly engaged in the story about Premier League referees being in Saudi, follow up on the story? The answer clearly is no.
So we’ll have to do it for them.
Having been ordered to stop working in Saudi the referees then turned to PGMO for compensation. It appears that PGMO then immediately raised the salary of its top officials to compensate for the loss of Saudi earnings.
Here it all gets a bit murky but it seems that PGMO then expected he PL clubs to start paying PGMO a lot more, so PGMO could compensate its referees for their loss of Saudi earnings.
But the clubs said no, they had a legal contract with PGMO to pay them at a set rate and they were not suddenly going to break that agreement just because PGMO had got themselves in a pickle. So PGMO announced it was on the edge of going into liquidation.
And there the matter has rested. PGMO is in crisis mode. The referees are under contract to work for PGMO and fear they would not get a good press is they suddenly went on strike, because there was no sympathy with them charging off to Saudi to handle a match, and then flying back to England to take on another game a couple of days later – especially when they made real cock-ups.
But PGMO had one weapon it could use: its deal with the English media via the Premier League and other leagues through which the mainstream media, and all the blogs that just follow the lead of the mainstream not to talk about referees. But meanwhile, the shortage of referees has grown.
What also set the cat among the pigeons was a piece with the headline “Objective Data: Liverpool Are Refereed VERY VERY Differently To Rival Clubs” Whether that article is objective or not is not the point, the pont is that the article contained an analysis. And that, the Premier League has not been used to seeing. An analysis of comparative refereeing is absolutely the very last thing PGMO wants on show, although the data of course is all there (we take it from Whoscored – see here for current data).
So we are now in the ludicrous situationion. PGMO the monopoly supplier is tied into a contract with the Premier League through which the referees were paid very modestly but could supplement their income in Saudi or elsewhere. Except that contract has now been changed so the refs want more money.
And the media won’t touch the story because it has a gentleman’s agreement with PGMO not to talk much about referees.
One might say, “what a mess!” Or maybe something stronger, for we are truly in the territory which with any other topic would at the very least be called a total disaster..
Man city game has proved for the 735th time that the refs in PL are utterly useless. They are corrupt, they are told which team has to win or which team should not win. They hate specific teams, they are stressed out because if they don’t do as they are told they probably get financial punishment. So it is a total cluster fuck, did anyone focus for a split second on the look on Oliver’s face whenever he was going to give a call against Arsenal? It’s like he couldn’t wait to do it fast enough, it’s like there was an urge, a need and a demand/strict orders to be followed by him. And then whenever it came to giving decisions against city it was obvious he had that painful expression on his face where it screams, ‘I know I’m on live tv but I was told to fix this match so that Arsenal don’t get 3 points’ , well in the end he just about managed to do so, he looked so relieved at the final whistle.
The fact that he has extended both 1st and 2nd half time added on by further 2 minutes just goes to show that he really wanted city to win. Coincidentally Trossard was shown a 2nd yellow 73 seconds AFTER the 6 minutes added on and city equalised in 98th minute, so not inside the 7 added minutes either. Doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what’s going on in the league. It’s been bought by city long time ago and this circus we call competition. There is no competition, there is an Arab princes’s toy named Premier League and then there are ‘also fans’ that’s it.