By Tony Attwood
Read the football blogs and newspaper articles on a daily basis, and you will find a couple of regular themes repeated over and over. Not in every piece, not every day, but in enough to give many a reader a feeling that Premier League football has become very predictable.
It started around 2017 as Manchester City headed toward their first league title since its triumvirate of top two finishes at the start of the decade, for what had become clear was that this was not a club putting together a great team, but then having to rebuild. For it was seen that City were rebuilding as they went and by 2018 they were winning the title again, no less than six times in seven years.
Such dominance had never been seen before and it seemed to suggest that the Premier League had become just like the French and German leagues where it was impossible to place a bet on next season’s title winners, because it would be PSG in France and Bayern Munich in Germany.
And yes those two clubs filled their stadia for each game, but the English league had never been like that. We’d had clubs win the league three times in a row, and ManU had dominated the early days of the Prem, but this ManC approach with its seemingly infinite financial resources, looked like it could dominate the Prem until the oil ran out. Which looked like being a long time off.
Except that the failure of ManC to win the league again after six wins in seven years followed being found guilty of 114 out of 115 charges for breaching the financial rules of the Premier League seemed to suggest that those running the PL had really not been paying attention to what was going on.
The suggestion soon arose (especially on X) that “the refs and @pgmol are aware of Man Citys guilty verdict since last year and they are under instructions to ensure they don’t win a title. And the easiest way to do that is the gift Arsenal the title. Only way to justify the decisions they get. Someone will lose their job as manager, but no one will know why.”
Now this takes us straight into the notion of a conspiracy within football. A conspiracy set up to… Well what? Presumably to make sure Man City don’t win the title again, presumably because that could cause a level of outrage in the football community that would be hard to contain.
But why gift the title to Arsenal? Presumably because they are the polar opposite of ManC – a kick and rush team that hasn’t won the title in 20 odd years.
What helped this allegation was the fact that it came on top of multiple other pieces which suggested not (as in previous years) that a particular ref was biased in a particular game, but rather that there was a conspiracy running through the whole of the PGMO.
Of course the PGMO case was not helped by the fact that from its very foundation, it has been a highly secretive body with no website, no press releases, no media presence etc etc. So these very serious allegations existed without their being any response from PGMO. No evidence was presented about the way referees treated Arsenal players because that was not what PGMO did.
Worse, such evidence as there was, was by and large only presented here, although it revealed that it was possible to make decent predictions of the outcome of matches by analysing the results the referee in each case had overseen. As the data shows while some referees, overseeing games almost each weekend, might see two thirds of their games as home wins, others might see under a quarter as home wins. Managers who studied the referees’ form could adjust their teams to accommodate the referees preferences and habits.
Now it wasn’t that the media would disagree with the analyses, it was the fact that despite the data being readily available on the internet, they would not touch it. And this was a worry because if the stats show that some referees generally oversee home wins while others see three quarters of their games as away wins or draws, that shows that referees have a major influence over results. And that of course is not how should be.
So it seems that in effect, the League’s referees, under the control of PGMO, are if not actually “fixing” league results, but nothing is being done to ensure that some refs should see lots and lots of home wins, while others oversee loads of away wins. Which means those clubs alert to such statistics and with players capable of changing their tactics game by game, will benefit in a way others won’t.
However the availability of this data and the way it can be used has never (as far as I know) been mentioned in the media. So fans remain ignorant of just how much influence which referee oversees a game, will actually have.
I have been watching football since I was in primary school – and I have now retired. So what is normally called “a lifetime”. And that has not been a lifetime watching Arsenal, for as my work has taken me around the country I’ve at different times become a regular at different grounds – different clubs, different leagues in fact, and even for a while in different countries. And as I have moved from area to area I’ve gone to watch the local team/s but without investing them with my support. I’ve been to grounds from Torquay to Aberdeen.
And going to watch clubs as a neutral can give one new insights not just into the way the clubs play, but the consistency of fan belief that the referees are useless. And over the years a new vision has crept into the lives of some supporters: that the referees are actively biased.
So while back in the 1960s it was the notion that the referee was incompetent (“blind” was the usual word used), that perception has shifted to one that suggests that the bulk of refs are against certain clubs. And because of PGMO’s refusal to engage in any debate or offer any statistics, that vision has grown into certainty. PGMO could have stopped its growth, but they never said a word.
Now of course explaining a club’s defeat can involve blaming certain players, the manager, the tactics etc etc. But what we now find is something that has arisen in the past five or ten years: that the referee is deliberately biased. And that means a total lack of faith in the integrity of the league. Way back in the last century it was commonplace for TV commentators to blame incompetent foreign referees when England lost. Now TV blames the players; the fans blame bent refs.
As for why this has come about, the fact is that the early days of clubs winning the league year after year died away and after Huddersfield and Arsenal each won the league three times running, the notion spread that if one club kept lifting the trophy there was something untoward gong on. Thus when ManU got nine titles in 14 seasons, perhaps for the first time, explanations beyond the ability of the manager were sought. After all Champan created brilliance at Huddersfield and Arsenal when games were not seen on TV – now everyone could observe the tactics.
But now in more recent days Manchester City have won the league six times in seven seasons and the mood of observers changed, for the Prem had been promoted as the most competitive league in the world. But now it looked like a replica of the French League or German League. Now it seems that with sufficient money a club like ManC could come from nowhere and basically dominate the league. Bookies stopped taking bets on who would win the league the following season. The Premier League has not yet become as predictable as the German league but club owners clearly believe that if they can just get the right manager, they can win the league. Last time I looked Nottingham Forest were about to appoint their fourth manager of the season!
And the managers are not being given much time. On October 28 Manchester United sacked Erik ten Hag in 2024. He had been in the job four months and the previous season had won the FA Cup. How different from Areta’s run of 8th, 8th, 5th, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd – a Cup win at the start.
For those of us focussed on London, the story is amusing. Roberto Di Matteo last six months after he won the Champions League and FA Cup with the money machine at Chelsa. Nuno Espirito Santo has been given his cards by West Ham. Southampton have dismissed four managers in in the last two months of the year across the past nine campaigns. And few seem to have worked out that managers might take a while to get things right. Arteta should be so grateful he came to Arsenal.
So we are in the situation in which the majority of current PL managers were appointed last summer. Their instructions are win one of the cups or get into Europe or you are out. The compensation costs paid by clubs to managers who fail must be enormous unless of course “getting into Europe next season” is written into the manager’s contract. But I suspect it is not.
