by Tony Attwood
In a previous article I wrote How football journalists draw conclusions without information and why football loves it this way
My point following on from that article note above is that it is not just football journalists that draw conclusions without information. This is what journalists do by and large while at the same time their editors decide what is and what isn’t news.
This is not to say that speculation is not of interest – indeed I would love to read some seriously researched and well-analysed views even if they include some speculation on why the enquiry into the 100 plus charges levied against Manchester City has still not been concluded.
Is it that they have such a robust defence that the case against them is falling apart? Is it that ManC have stated they will appeal each individual case one at a time with a fulsome team of top lawyers, if they are found guilty of anything? Is it that the case was so poorly constructed ManC have walked right through it, and the League have no idea how to handle their defeat, and ManC are just sitting there smirking?
Of course, sometimes the state orders journalists not to report certain issues “in the national interest”. But in normal courts of law the hearings are open to the public and we can know what is going on. And no I am not a lawyer myself, although twice in my life I have been called up for jury service, one of these being at the Old Bailey on a 10-week trial, so I do have some insight from the public’s point of view of what trials are like.
But now we live in a world where stuff happens but the media shuts up. Consider the moment 18 months ago when the government ordered the closure of hundreds and hundreds of school buildings because their concrete was crumbling and they might collapse, (the state having allowed builders to use lightweight concrete even though concerns were raised in about Raac in 1996).
That story came and went and schools are still closed. Meanwhile, we find that government decisions in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in around 45,000 death of people in care homes.”
Now if you read the news, you will see that the prison system in the UK was described by the UN enquiry as amounting to “psychological torture.” The government invented Imprisonment for Public Protection, but are thinking of abandoning it – because they have run out of prisons. One might ask, did no one think this might happen when they invented the idea?
These are all appalling situations, and I haven’t even got to the Post Office Scandal. where innocent sub-postmasters were imprisoned for fraud while the problem was with the software the government told postmasters to use.
OK if you have stayed with me this far you are possibly thinking, “Tony’s really lost it this time – he’s posted a political commentary on the wrong blog.” But now, if you think of the points raised above and then think of the ultra-secretive referees’ organisation, PGMO what conclusion can you come to?
Of course, I have no evidence I can offer to show that PGMO is not acting in the best interests of the game all the time. My argument is that this is a country in which there are mass failures of large projects and monopolies. So to assume that the ultra-secretive PGMO has nothing wrong with it, really is starting from the wrong end. The assumption should be: it is secretive, it is a monopoly, so we ought to be investigating.
And certainly, we can’t say it should not be investigated because football is always shown to be clean and healthy. You only have to look at the number of sex abuse cases in football clubs to recognise that isn’t the case.
But when we have so many clubs in financial difficulty, often extreme financial difficulty, an absolute refusal of the media to comment about the secretiveness of the referee organisation, in a country where projects from medical care to the building of schools are always going wrong on a massive scale, what possible reason could you have for believing that this ultra-secret body is always right?
I do have a very personal reason for not trusting large monopolistic organisations. Before retirement, I was chair of a plc – a company that did everything it could to abide by government regulations at every level from personnel issues to paying our taxes in full on time.
Yet on three separate occasions across the years, Customers and Exicse did a VAT inspection and said we had not paid our taxes properly, each time focussing on the same specific issue concerning a single element in our work. Each time we presented back to Customs and Excise a copy of their own regulations, and after months of saying nothing they backed down. We hadn’t found some clever way around the VAT rules – we were following the rules exactly as laid down by the state.
This is the country we live in: things go wrong on a huge scale, and can take forever to put right. So in such a country, I say again, what possible reason is there to believe that everything is right with the ultra-secretive monopoly suppliers of referees in the Premier League? Just because the media won’t touch the story, that doesn’t mean there is no story.
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