- How a new part of league football has been thoroughly weaponised.
- Who runs football? PGMO? The clubs? And what happened to the Combination?
By Tony Attwood
There once was a time when managers and other officials in football clubs watched what they said, being careful not to blame referees even for mistakes, let alone for being incompetent. Now it seems that has all gone, at least in a handful of clubs where the management feel they are above any laws and rules in football and can say what they want.
Take, for example, the article that comes below the headline, “Guardiola wants City players to raise their game rather than trust ‘flip of a coin’ officials” which, just in case you didn’t get the full message from the Guardian’s article, goes on to say “Manager says ‘referees didn’t do their job’ in FA Cup finals”
Or moving away from Manchester C., consider these comments from the play-offs: ‘It breaks my heart: Emotional Hellberg accuses Southampton of ‘disgraceful’ act and Saints launch internal review into Middlesbrough spying allegations”.
It is also noteworthy that one of the most common phrases used to describe what anyone in football says these days is “bizarre rant,” and the most common story now involves not football but spying, as in “Saints launch internal review into Middlesbrough spying allegations”. Again from the Guardian.
Or how about “EFL needs to act fast and expel cheating Southampton” in the Telegraph
. Once, there was a time when managers and other officials in football clubs watched what they said, being careful not to blame referees even for mistakes, let alone for being incompetent. Now it seems that it has all gone at least in a handful of clubs, where the management feel they are above any laws and rules in football.
Take for example, the article that comes below the headline, “Guardiola wants City players to raise their game rather than trust ‘flip of a coin’ officials’ which, just in case you didn’t get the full message from the Guardian’s article, goes on to say, “Manager says ‘referees didn’t do their job’ in FA Cup finals”
Or moving away from Manchester C., consider these comments from the play-offs: “‘It breaks my heart: Emotional Hellberg accuses Southampton of ‘disgraceful’ act and Saints launch internal review into Middlesbrough spying allegations”.
It is also noteworthy that one of the most common phrases used to describe what anyone in football says these days is “bizarre rant,” and the most common story now involves not football but spying, as in, “Saints launch internal review into Middlesbrough spying allegations”. Again from the Guardian.
Or how about “EFL needs to act fast and expel cheating Southampton” in the Telegraph which is followed up by “scandal means they should be barred from the Wembley final,” along with a further comment, just in case we hadn’t got the message, that the club “must not” be allowed to play in the final.
So we have two issues – one is that the clubs will cheat whenever they can, and the other is that referees are too silly to be able to spot cheating when it is so obvious that a journalist sitting 100 yards away can see it. And he puts the blame on the tactics practised in Middlesbrough’s training session last week.
Apparently, the previous Leeds manager, “Marcelo Bielsa admitted he spied on every opponent in training,” and Leeds were fined £200,000 with new rules brought in to stop this in future. So we are told Southampton uses “sly underhand methods,” plus the allegation that the board has admitted it and EFL has ignored the matter.
Now this is interesting because for years we have been highlighting the problem with referees, some of whom constantly oversee home wins, others who regularly see lots of away wins, and we have suggested that, at the very least, to overcome this, each referee should only oversee each PL team twice at most – once at home and once away.
But the media has ignored this and instead gone after their own story, which highlights the alleged activities of one particular club but ignores the referee problems. And we might ask why this is.
The most likely answer to that question is that the various leagues cannot and will not allow any suggestion of successful cheating in football, for the simple reason that this would discredit the whole English League system. And that, of course, is the priority of all the individuals involved with football. Football in England is a commodity sold worldwide, and any suggestion of any form of cheating or bias, involving a club, individual players, or a referee, could destroy the entire financial model.
And so this story, along with our regular reporting of bizarre variances in refereeing standards and behaviour, gets blocked, and suggestions that one club cheated by spying on the training techniques of another is simply being kicked to one side.