It's All About You

Jonathan Liew's midweek column in the Guardian starts with sarcasm - "Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card" - but doesn't manage to advance much beyond it, unless you consider the Punch-style whimsy - the idea that you can be a football writer and know almost nothing about the leading referees - as an improvement. What the column doesn't do (well, obviously) is talk about the Myles Lewis-Skelly red card, other than to imply that those who have questioned it were guilty of hyperbole: "That was almost certainly not the worst decision you’ve ever seen." Liew has some self-awareness in an otherwise self-regarding piece: "nobody needs another sensible middlebrow columnist explaining in deeply patronising serif font that, actually, it’s the fans who are the problem here." But this is merely the downpayment on his final conclusion that "much of the stigmatisation of referees is a sublimation of other grievances: fan disenfranchisement, rising prices, malign owners, useless administrators, a sport that at an elemental level no longer works for us." Everyone and everything else is to blame.

At heart, most Guardian sports journalists prefer other sports to football - cricket, rugby, tennis, you get the idea - so their attitude towards the game is one of barely-concealed class disdain mixed with professional ennui. Compare and contrast the coverage whenever cricket or rugby are in "crisis". The class angle is obvious when you see Liew equate anger over refereeing standards "with “two-tier policing” and “legitimate concerns about immigration” as something over which the little people can obsess." In suggesting we shouldn't dismiss such concerns he is not just being patronisingly ironic in Guardian house-style, he is reverting for comic effect to the newspaper's atavistic view of football fans as part of an uncultured mob. There are plenty of people angered by Michael Oliver's decision who voted remain in 2016 and would support greater generosity towards asylum-seekers today (some may even be fans of cricket). That these issues are not of equivalent political or social importance does not mean that one in particular should not be addressed.

By submerging refereeing into a general bleat about football as a rapacious industry and football fans as unreasonable consumers, Liew seeks to dilute the issue of the PGMOL's high-profile errors and questionable use of VAR. The latter has raised standards, but by winnowing the chaff it has also highlighted arbitrariness (the Lewis-Skelly red card could have been challenged by Darren England at the time). Liew's plea that referees "should be anonymous" is both irrelevant to the issue of poor judgement and the inadequate recourse when referees get it wrong. VAR has helped, but it has been implemented in a way that seeks to protect the referees rather than the integrity of the game, hence the long delays and poor communication. Despite his disdain, even Liew cannot help but admit that the quality of refereeing is a legitimate concern (sic) and one that has become more pronounced as the referees have lost the anonymity that he cherishes. In his words, the PGMOL has become "a sort of floating body in the ether, run neither by the Football Association nor the Premier League and thus answerable to nobody but its own insatiable main-character energy".

In the event, Arsenal appealed the red card and it was duly over-turned by the independent regulatory commission. This wasn't unexpected, given the near-unanimity among ex-players and coaches (who provide the bulk of the 5-man commission) in the aftermath that it was a yellow card, but you don't have to be paranoid have to wonder whether the game's "guardians", such as the FA, may have been irked by the outcome and whether that may have contributed to what in football parlance is referred to as "a bit of afters", with Arsenal charged for failing to control their players. The media management of the fallout included the report that Michael Oliver's family had faced social media abuse and threats, the aim apparently being to paint the referee as the real victim, which is never a smart strategy. The coincidental Sun interview with David Coote, which linked his well-known troubles with the pressure of being secretly gay, likewise came across as special pleading on behalf of the referees obliged to survive in "the macho world of football". The whiff of thuggery is never far from the surface in media descriptions.

The Guardian, in the person of Barney Ronay, cast a typically withering glance in the direction of Coote's revelations and his choice of newspaper in which to make them, including the now standard ironic self-deprecation ("why is this person in the Guardian newspaper now complaining"). Not only did he criticise the grubby motives of the Sun ("monetising Coote's distress"), but he also suggested that associating homosexuality with bad behaviour would not encourage other gay referees to come out, which is a fair point. But that negative association is also being made by Ronay, albeit in a deniable "look what this other paper printed" fashion. Just as Jonathan Liew's column didn't need writing, so neither did Barney Ronay's, and both can be accused of making themselves the main character in their relationship with football, as well as chasing clicks by contrarian sneering. Typically, Ronay's final conclusion is that the game itself is rotten, "the real takeaway is how brutally football has chewed this person up", which chimes with Liew's take that football is essentially vicious.

Let us return to the Lewis-Skelly red card decision. One of the regular reasons for dismissing criticism of referees is what Liew describes as "conspiracy hokum": the idea that refs have it in for your favoured club. It's important here to distinguish between bias and corruption (e.g. Coote has faced questions about whether he issued a yellow card as the result of a betting tip to a mate). There is no substantiated evidence of corruption in the English Premier League, but that referees are subject to unconcisous bias is academically well-established. They are influenced by the crowd, they tend to favour home teams and currently successful teams, and there is a degree of regional sympathy. This last point is particularly salient in English football because of its partisanship: every referee is also assumed to be a fan (many are happy to publicise their allegiances). Most PGMOL referees hail from the North West or elsewhere above the Severn-Wash line. London is barely represented (compare and contrast its contribution to players and coaches), which gives rise to a certain paranoia among some fans of teams in the capital.

The issue is not that the PGMOL is a closed shop, though its lack of diversity does make it look like one, but that it is an intrinsically conservative institution with its own cultural norms, which above all means defending your mates against players and coaches and treating fans as ignorant and ignorable. The focus on bias, which the media implicitly stokes as much as it formally derides, is a moralistic distraction from this sociological point, not least because unconcious bias tends to be very marginal and in some cases (e.g. home advantage) will even out. What matters to fans are game-changing incidents, which in football is a reflection of how many such incidents there can be and how their impact varies over the duration of a match. Issuing a red card in the opening minutes or a penalty in the closing minutes matters a lot more than vice versa. And what some fans have begun to suspect is that referees are sensitive to this, hence the chants of "Who's the wanker in the black" and "You don't know what you're doing" have increasingly given way to "It's all about you".

It is this suspicion that referees want to be the centre of attention that drives the current dissatisfaction, not the "sublimation of other grievances" as Liew put it. And, whether you consider it bias or not, a controversial decision involving a big club (or a national team) is more likely to raise the profile of a referee than a similar decision involving a small club. This is why Liew's appeal for referees to be "highly paid and totally anonymous" is naive, even allowing for the weary irony. English referees have been making themselves the centre of attention ever since matches were televised - e.g. Jack Taylor awarding two penalties in the 1974 World Cup Final and Clive Thomas denying Brazil a winning goal against Sweden in the 1978 World Cup. The very existence of the PGMOL is a by-product of television and the money it has injected into the game, while the characteristics the organisation displays - prickliness, pedantry, vanity - are those that could be recognised in Taylor and Thomas all those years ago. What football needs is not more VAR or less VAR but more humble referees, which would require a massive cultural change at the grassroots. But so long as top-division games are comprehensively televised, don't expect it to filter up to the PGMOL.