THE PGMOL CRITIQUE NO ONE WANTS TO WRITE (LONG READ)

SOMEONE HAD TO WRITE IT

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I don’t want to spend my entire life writing about referees, but Mr. Coote was caught taking down a line of white powder Henry the Hoover would have had difficulties with, and it raises a whole host of problems almost none of the big UK football opinion writers want to touch.

So I’ll go there with a little bit of curiosity that is not dripping in the type of swamp juice that smells distinctly like, “I might have this guy in a WhatsApp group.”

Firstly, let me be a friend to this guy. He works a high-pressure job, he’s probably quite isolated, and he is clearly not a man who has had a life of being popular. I am trying not to be insulting, but we’ve all played Sunday League football, and anyone who spent more time officiating as a 16-year-old than playing, certainly made some choices that would make for an interesting psych dissertation. This is not meant to be mean. But to be a ref, at a very base level, you have to like being the center of attention, you have to have a desire for ultimate power, and there’s a part of you that revels in being unpopular.

It is not hard to see how this sort of role could push you toward extracurricular escapism. You can understand how someone who lacks popularity might be easily duped into believing strangers had his best interests at heart. ‘You’re a legend, mate’ must be intoxicating to hear when you can’t even go to a Londis without being called a worthless melt.

Fame and power has been the downfall of many a sports star, so why not a ref? It’s a different type of fame, but still enough that someone can do you the ultimate dirty and film you when you’re weak and share it with pure destruction in mind. That is grim behavior and it shouldn’t be celebrated.

But here’s the thing—his job is judgment. Clarity of thought is key to being good in the role. When you are on the pitch deciding the fate of millions of pounds, hundreds of jobs, and the joy of everyday people, you have a responsibility to be better than the weekend warrior builders, bankers, and brokers.

The professional media seems to be desperately keen to roll Mr. Coote under the bus and palm this off as a case of a very bad egg.

That is not acceptable.

Fans won’t have it.

Football clubs won’t have it.

We have to use this moment to ask some very serious questions about how this sort of incident could have been used to leverage bad outcomes.

DEFINE: KOMPROMAT

Kompromat is a Russian term derived from "компрометирующий материал," which means "compromising material." It refers to information collected on a public figure, politician, businessperson, or other influential individuals with the intent of using it to create negative publicity, exert influence, blackmail, or extort them.

The goal of kompromat is often not for direct financial gain but rather to leverage the information for power or influence, manipulating the individual into making decisions favorable to the party holding the compromising material.

Allegedly, this David Coote scandal has been kicking about for at least two years. The white powder incident was at the Euros; the Klopp video was a little after covid.

You can palm this off as tin-hat nonsense—but play it out:

• Premier League official has a substance problem.

• This noise is gathered as private intelligence.

• Hard evidence is acquired in secret to confirm.

• Evidence is presented to the official—the consequences are laid out:

  • You lose your job.

  • You lose your book deal.

  • You lose any chance of a media career.

  • You go from £150,000 a year to a part-time job in Home Depot.

  • If you have a mortgage, you will default.

  • All your friends will abandon you—your union pals disassociate.

What would you do to protect yourself against the above?

This isn’t some random idea I’ve cooked up. It’s a tried and true method of persuasion used by governments and bad guys all around the world.

Target the point of least resistance

I have written countless times on this blog that if you were looking to bend the Premier League to your will, the weakest point of entry would be PGMOL.

It is totally unaccountable—bizarre decisions are not interrogated, performance isn’t seriously monitored, it doesn’t have an independent auditor, and it’s not run by serious people.

• Two yellow cards in the same passage of play for the first time ever? Move on.

• Send off Declan for kicking the ball away one week. Same ref doesn’t give a yellow for the same offence the next. Move on.

• Referees aren’t meant to intervene in the on-pitch decisions—but a Liverpool fan VAR weighs in to change the opinion of the ref to get Saliba a red… so he misses the Liverpool game. Please, move on.

Now factor in that referees earn a low salary when you consider their outsized impact on players who can earn £400k a week, in a league that is worth hundreds of millions. If David Coote is sacked, he could be destitute because one would suspect he needs a role after he retires to sustain his lifestyle. The max of £200k a year, after reaching peak, is not good if you can only earn until you are 45.

What does that lead to more generally? Well, we’ve seen refs take freelance gigs DURING THE SEASON at nation-states that own football clubs. It could mean pushing to be the center of attention so you get TV deals and newspaper columns. But the nefarious issue at hand here is it makes you a vulnerable asset.

This is not 1972. Your local sugar factory magnate does not own the local team. We are living in a world where the biggest clubs in the world are run by people who are using the global prestige of local English clubs to promote entire countries. The rules are not the same these days. The money is not gargantuan. The drive to go above and beyond to get an advantage is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Win at all costs has a whole new meaning in 2024, so we should take weaknesses in the system with the utmost seriousness.

So…

If you have a drug or alcohol problem, someone will find out, and you are vulnerable.

If you have a secret debt, someone will find out, and you are vulnerable.

If you are lonely and desperate, someone will find out, and you are vulnerable.

Footballers are rich. Footballers are popular. Footballers are rigorously tested for substance abuse. It is very hard to get at them—but they do fall. Just look at the West Ham player under serious investigation - he could lose his entire career because he was allegedly weak. Look at the Brentford striker who has a big goal haul in the Premier League and ended up in Saudi, because he was vulnerable.

Refs? Who is even looking? Not the football media. They’re too busy writing for the Crouch End set who applaud slapping down the heathen fans they detest. That Guardian writer with the flowery prose (long prose which I appreciate) predictably takes us through 2,700 words that shifts his perspective from previously suggesting “fans are imagining bias” to now landing on “fans are not imagining bias, but actually, he said mean things because of the pressure, and he allegedly snorted chemicals because English football is an unbearable pressure cooker, but none of it means corruption, and does any of it matter? YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR ASSUMING THE WORST.” The conclusion of the primo opinion writer at The Guardian is: Well, now we know there’s bias, isn’t it all a bit sad?

We have to do better here. If you are lucky enough to write 2700 garden-y words once a week for a living, being curious and kicking the English Boxwood on massive scandals is the bare minimum if you want me to put a £5 sub down because I’ve read 374 articles for free in the month of October.

Working in sport is a privilege. Working in the Premier League is ‘Quentin Tarantino wants my thoughts on his final film script’ levels of privilege. As a referee, the job comes with responsibilities on and off the pitch. If those responsibilities are not met, there can be no excuse.

The one thing The Guardian writer correctly calls is that we now have transparency—and it is worse than we feared.

The Premier League cannot let this crisis go to waste. It doesn’t matter what Gary Neville thinks. No one cares what the Crouch End Almond Milk Latte Mandem believes about the sadness of all of this. We need to see brutal change at an organization not fit for purpose.

Here are some hot takes on what to change, but first, the problem.

Familiarity is one of the biggest problems at PGMOL.

It’s a union, not a professional high-performance organization like a football club. If you work in a business, you’ll know the worst type of culture to be in is one that pretends you’re family. No one ever sacks their dad, no one tells their brother reheating a giant kebab in the office microwave at 0830 is unacceptable, and when it’s La Familia, you let bad behavior slide because love is more important than marginal gains on stationary costs.

I’m going to change the above with my 6 point plan:

ELITE PREMIER LEAGUE REFS PLC

The Premier League needs to do to the referees what it did to the English Football League. Stop believing in fairness and create an elite space for the very best (and don’t share). Start a fresh organization that the Premier League owns outright. This body will be run like a start-up. It will report to the Premier League board. Its CEO will not be a referee.

ELITE PREMIER LEAGUE VAR PLC

You didn’t expect me to drop a madness like that, did you? How could I not. We’re going to set up a separate organization that runs VAR. Why? Because nothing sums up how bad the refs are quite like the failure of VAR. Even with slow motion replays, more eyeballs, and screens on the side of the pitch… they still can’t get it right.

These two organizations will be separated to kill the familiarity and kinship that has made the technology so bad - and address the truth: it’s a different job when you’re on VAR.

This is Mike Dean after an awful decision against Chelsea:

"I didn’t want to send him up because he is a mate as well as a referee and I think I didn’t want to send him up because I didn’t want any more grief than he already had. Anthony, he is big and bald and ugly enough to know if he is going to the screen he is going to the screen for a reason. If someone pulls their hair now it’s dead easy. It’s just a brainwave by me, a really bad call by me, and it kind of affected me as VAR going forward."

The job of VAR is to correct injustice and support the person on the pitch with good decisions. VARs need to be nerds whose main skills are deep understanding of the rules and lightning-fast decision-making that is accurate. This organization needs to be tech automation forward with a heavy focus on just being right every damn time.

I don’t want them to be friends with the refs. Empathy for the guy on the pitch is not an attribute that makes the game better

I worked in TGI Friday’s when I was 18 (HATED IT) and the thing I found most perplexing is that as a waiter, I was hierarchically lower in the pecking order than the ‘flair-ers’ who were bar-people that created insanely bad cocktails in combination with a circus act of throwing cups and flasks at each other. That is what will happen with refs. Hierarchy and pecking order will be found in joint operations. Refs on the pitch will claim to be the big dogs who do the ‘real work’ - and we can’t have that.

I want accurate decisions and some ‘co-equal branches of government’ type structure. My VAR nerds will be equals in this new world.

One more point here as I’m rambling - the very fact that it is a PGMOL punishment to be put on VAR tells you all you need to know about why this idea is going to be of huge benefit to the league.

INDEPENDENT AUDITOR

I don’t want Northwest refs on Northwest derbies.

I don’t want Liverpool fans on Arsenal games.

I don’t want managers that have improbable long stretches of 100% wins for league leaders continuing to get those same teams without analysis of decisions.

I don’t want to see people who took money from nation-states or businesses owned by clubs lining up in huge games with their clubs. Why? Fairness in the Premier League is knowing that no one reffing NOW is dreaming of an after-life job that has been intimated.

I want performance monitored. I want decisions explained. I want to know that if something mad happens, someone is there assessing it and reporting back to the Premier League.

I want refs drug-tested. I want their tax returns as part of the record. I want anything that could tarnish the game dealt with transparently.

Sport can only thrive if fairness is reality and perception. This independent auditor will bring a level of accountability and scrutiny that we quite clearly don’t have.

INVITE THE WORLD

The Premier League refs are all English bar one… who is Australian. There’s one black referee. Zero London refs. A large majority are known faces because they’re not good at their jobs.

That has to change. If you were to set up a new org from scratch to manage the Premier League, would you accept the above list knowing how tribal football support is in England. It’s mad that we’ve just gone along with ‘no way would birthright support in areas with toxic levels of support impact decision-making.’

I want to set up a refereeing scouting network. Hire a data company to analyze the best refs in the UK across the leagues—promote the top, top people.

The Premier League clubs will double their fund and make refs’ salaries much more coveted, and the two new organizations I created will recruit the very best in the world because we’ll pay the handome money. Sexy money attracts the best. If you’re earning 10/10 money you become less vulnerable to offers from elsewhere - and less prone to take risks.

THE CULTURE

We’re going to shift the whole culture of refereeing.

It’ll be high performance. Sorry to go Jake Humphrey on you.

We are going to have a vision.

Let the games flow, and make the best decisions for the fairest outcomes.

We’re going to have a mindset.

The best referees are not noticed.

We’re going to have a rewards structure.

The auditors will score decision-making and in-game management and bonus the fairest referees, giving them the chance to earn 50% of their base salary for being excellent.

That’s measurable outcomes baby.

ACCOUNTABILITY

• Tenure is no longer important in my system. We’re all about performance. If you’re great, you stay. If you fall below the standard, you’re out.

• If you besmirch the reputation of the organization, we’ll pay you off and say goodbye. But all refs will get a good pension like players do in NFL.

• If you get too familiar with certain teams, you won’t ref them.

• If there is bad feedback from the majority of managers in the league, we’ll listen to it internally, and we’ll address it.

• Referees will not be above criticism, and we’ll shape the organization to be a service to the league.

TO CONCLUDE

The refereeing problem has been presented as an impossible challenge for far too long—I can accept that from writers who like being part of the groupchats, but I can’t accept it from the Premier League, who will monitor the calorific effects of standing too close to a donut for a marginal game opportunity.

The Premier League needs to get serious about improving the game—because perception is reality. The Crouch End set don’t set the narrative in 2024. If the global masses think the product has been corrupted by bad officiating, then it has, and the league needs to move fast to assure fans who pay monstrous amounts of money that they are being heard.

Formula One assumed growth was a guarantee; then they had a run-in with the the perception of fairness, and they have been stagnant for three years. It can happen to any sport. Please don’t let it happen to the Premier League for something that could be fixed so easily.

Ok, now listen to the Thursday Therapy Podcast. x