How “The ten most irritating things about football” are used to hide the real debate

By Tony Attwood

An article in the Telegraph asks us to consider the “Ten most irritating things about modern football” and very clever it is too, because it succeeds rather well in diverting our thoughts from key issues that the newspaper, along with all its rivals, absolutely does not want us to talk about.

So let’s consider just a few of the  points they don’t even want to mention….  

1: No referee interviews; no questioning of PGMO

As we have noted so often in other countries referees can be interviewed live after the matches, but not here.  No chance for any person in the middle to explain why something happened or even what happened.   

2.  Referee variation

Why does John Brooks see 70% of his games as home wins while Robert Jones sees under 18% of his games as home wins?  Both men have been in charge of over 13 games this season so this is not a case of just having an oddity from a ref after two or three games.  

41% of all Premier League matches are home wins in this campaign.   And yet for Jones, I repeat the number is only 17.6%.   With these guys we know the result before kick-off.  And yet the media never mentions it.

Does the PGMO look at fixtures and where they see that this is a nailed-on certainty for the home team (for example Liverpool v Ipwich) they give the game to Brooks?   But if the game is Arsenal v Liverpool they give it to Jones – is that it?   

During the pandemic, we covered in some detail the way the level of home and away wins changed.  For with no crowds, or only very small crowds present, the away teams started to win many more games.

As we then reported the academic media got very interested in this, and sat down a range of referees in front of TV screens to watch matches some with no sound on some with full crowd noise.  Every time a possibly contentious decision came up the match stopped and the TV-watching referees had to note if they saw an infringement or not, and if so which side was to blame.

The results were published in academic papers and reported on Untold, but ignored utterly by the mainstream media and PGMO.  For in essence, they found that referees who could hear the sound of the crowd were influenced by the crowd and thus became home-biased.  Those who couldn’t hear the crowd came much closer to making decisions that were deemed right by a panel of experts judging the decisions.

In short, crowds can influence referees, and it seems reasonable to argue that since the pandemic some referees have realised this, and responded by being more inclined to ignore crowd demands.  Some however have not changed.  Hence we now have some home refs and some away refs.

3.  Total secrecy.

Continuing this theme,  PGMO refuse referees the chance to talk to the media as they do in Germany, so nothing is explained.  And given point two above you can see why.  Because PGMO know as well as we do, that referees are influenced by crowds, and they really don’t want to admit that.

4 Silly examples.

The things the article objects to are often horrifically silly given the size of the problems that football is facing as outlined above.  Certainly, raising issues like sock designs shows just how pathetically stupid the article is, but if that weren’t enough they complain about “Oversized benches”.

The reason clubs are allowed to put more players on the bench is so that they have cover in most positions in the event of an injury, or a need to reshuffle following a sending-off and to allow newly recruited players and younger players to be integrated more rapidly into the team culture, by having them part of the squad. It’s pretty obvious.

5. Profit and sustainability rules

To put these down as a bit of nonsense either shows just how far the media is in support of Manchester City, and Chelsea.  The financial rules are not perfect, but if we didn’t have such rules ManC would be running even more financially amock than it has been doing.  Clearly, the current rules have not done the job, since ManC are still running rings around the League, effectively saying “We are going to bankrupt you if you don’t let us do what we want.”  Isn’t that something worth having rules to stop?

So the list goes on, but there is one clever one we have to mention.  Look at this: “When you have so many insightful, energetic and engaging voices analysing football it makes the drivel hard to stomach.”  They are worried about clichés in fact, and yes they are annoying, but compared with the problem of what the media refuse to cover in terms of refereeing, that’s not even in the top 100.

As a diversionary tactic, the article is clever.  In fact, maybe we ought to have diversionary tactics in our list of the five most irritating things…