- The problem with referees is not the refs: it is PGMOL
- At last the proof: it is Arsenal that is constantly hit by bad VAR decisions
By Tony Attwood
Yesterday we opened with the headline “PGMOL is bleeding money”. And we went on to point out that the referees’ association now has massive debts deespite being a monopoly supplier.
The reason for this loss is in part PGMO’s own fault as they decided to fight the government tax office over the issue of whether referees were employees or were self-employed. It terms of tax that is important and it appears (to me at least) that PGMOL was so used to having its own way on the pitch the organisation was unable to see they were losing the case, and so kept on appealing until the Supreme Court ruled against them and PGMOL, already short of cash, then had to pay the court costs of the UK taxman.
It is also a fact that virtually every PL club has arguments with PGMOL, except of course Manchester City and Liverpool, who never seem upset. And because of this the majority in the League won’t agree to pay referees more. As a result from next season, we will start seeing referees who normally work in the Championship and below, taking PL games.
Meanwhile, PGMOL is pressing on with introducing more offside technology, without resolving exactly what the worries are that clubs have about existing technology. (Remember Arteta’s protests at Newcastle about the ball going out before the opposition scored. TV and the newspapers just made a big thing of his “rant” (as if the newspapers don’t rant far more every day) and PGMOL felt strong enough to tell him to shut up. But photographic evidence showed he was right. The ball had gone out. No one in authority apologised.)
But perhaps the biggest scandal (and one that is rarely mentioned but sits there all the time), is that of referee bonuses. The problem here is one that was picked up by the Telegraph (see the link above), that, “referees get bonuses authorised by the Key Match Incident panel which is made up of former players and managers.”
That they could do something about PGMOL and referees is obvious. PGMOL is just about bankrupt and everyone is unhappy with the system, so change should be easy. And yet somehow the whole system stumbles on from one crisis to another.
And in the midst of this is the catastrophic PGMOL. It is, as I pointed out in the last article, completely bust. It has no money, lots of debts, and no realistic way of paying off its debts. And according to the Telegraph, neither it nor the FA has a meeting room in which all the PL referees can meet. So disrupted and impoverished is PGMOL that all its psychologists resigned last year in a pay dispute, and they haven’t been replaced. Thus there is no support for referees who face (rightly or wrongly it doesn’t matter in this regard) constant abuse.
And as we noted above, the organisation kept on appealing and appealing in its legal case over methods of payment for referees – and just kept on losing.
As to why PGMOL is so chaotic – that probably is because by and large it controls itself, while seemingly (given the issue we highlighted recently about Arsenal getting so few penalties in its favour, while getting so many against it) immune to criticism in the media. I don’t know if the media has formally agreed with PGMOL not to criticise the referees, but it certainly acts as if it does.
Yet PGMOL is a monopoly supplier, and so they have total power. A strike by them would bring the League to a halt, with no referees and linespeople available to take their place. The trouble is however that if the referees went on strike, we might not notice since the media never comment either on referees or on the affairs of PGMOL.
The problem is that the PL knows that it has been getting referees on the cheap compared with the rest of Europe, but they also know the rest of Europe won’t touch an English referee, both because most of them don’t speak any foreign languages, and because their approach to football’s rules is so different from the rest of the world.
Worse, there is constant chaos everywhere. Consider this: you would expect that the VAR operation is handled by one contractor. But no, one contractor handles off-side issues, another contractor handles fouls. You really couldn’t make this up.
Meanwhile, PGMOL and the League are in constant arguement with each other about which technology is best, how many cameras there should be in each ground and where those cameras should be.
As a result, refereeing in England is a farse and a fiasco. And nothing is being done to sort it out. But at least we can understand why the league doesn’t want to pay the referees anything extra. As everyone in business will tell you, if you take on HM Revenue and Customs and win, everyone wants to know how you did it. Take them on and lose, no one has any sympathy for you at all.
