PGMOL MUST BE DISMANTLED
I don't want to ruin a post by just talking about another PGMOL abomination courtesy of a deeply flawed referee, so I'll start with this.
WHAT A PERFORMANCE FROM THE BOYS!
I haven't seen Arsenal play with pure venom this season, but against Wolves, I think we got pretty close. We were completely in control of the game until Michael Oliver, high on PGMOL immunity from consequences, decided to try and bury Arsenal by sending off an Arsenal player for the second time this season in injury time in the first half. MLS dropped a standard ‘dark arts’ trip in transition, the type you see every week from all the big teams. The sort that never ends in a red card because the offense took place 85 yards from goal had two defenders covering, and there was no malice in the challenge.
Those things didn't matter to Oliver. He got away with sending Martinelli off two seasons ago with two yellows in the same passage of play (never been seen before, never been seen since). He didn't face any punishment for sending Leo Trossard off for kicking the ball away (never been seen before/interpretation of the rule has changed, so it hasn’t been seen since). So why not try another 'never been seen before' by sending off MLS? What made the whole thing even more desperate was the VAR team saw that challenge on replay and they agreed with it. What are the chances that two separate groups of professional refs saw a red card offence that no one in the entire football universe agreed with - and both thought it was the right way to proceed?
We'll come back to his cheating ways later - the core takeaway here? It didn't matter. Arsenal went to the mat with one arm tied behind our back and fought like we had a bionic spare hidden in our trousers. You barely noticed that we were a man down. The team fought with a chip the size of a car on their shoulder. They prodded, probed, and opened up Wolves.
It was never going to be one-way traffic, hard to cover defensively when you're down a man chasing a game. There were stomach-churning moments. Cunha sliced across goal from a set piece, narrowly missing. Nouri broke one-on-one, and Raya stood his ground and palmed the shot to his right - a stunning save, if I've ever seen one. The Spain number one cemented his key role in the game late on when he raced a Wolves winger to a loose ball and won with an outrageously timed slide tackle. You don’t often see Raya do emotion-ing, but he celebrated that one. Best keeper in the Prem? No. Best in the world.
The main focus of heartburn was wondering where the goal would come from. Martinelli was dreadful, Trossard was creating but not really causing problems himself, and Kai was picking up great positions but fluffing his lines. I can say this because we won… he’s taking up 9 positions. It’s a good sign that he’s in the right place to miss. He wasn’t earlier in the season. All strikers miss, if you’re expecting Sesko to be clinical, please watch him. The power of great strikers is to be in lots of great positions and play the numbers game. Kai is doing that now.
The game came back in our direction when Wolves' Joao Gomes begged for a red card after getting away with murder. He dropped a horrible leg breaker on MLS, which incredibly, Michael Oliver adjudged to be just a second yellow, not a straight red offence. It was laughable, but the admin on the red didn't matter; the player was off, and it leveled the playing field. I also suspect that error will see the red card for MLS overturned.
So where did the magic come from? Calafiori. Martinelli put a speculative cross into the box, the clearance from Wolves was poor, Calafiori was lying in wait. In an extremely smooth move, like an Italian espresso pour, he swept a perfect first-time strike into the bottom corner.
Arsenal saw out the game to take home three of the most important season-defining points of the season. The victory had it all.
The whole footballing world saw PGMOL at its worst, corrupting the values of the beautiful game, and they agreed Arsenal are being reffed differently
The boys didn't cave and allow themselves to be victims of this insidious behavior
The win should tell them that anything is possible this season if they can show that sort of grit.
That red card, our fourth of the season could have seen a weaker team off… but these boys won’t be beaten. They’re playing above and beyond expectations, even down to ten men. I suspect they’ll now start to believe they can do something 1998ish if given the chance.
As for Michael Oliver: It's time for him to go. The Premier League cannot allow this sort of god-complex behavior to continue.
I've been really thinking about this issue and trying to frame why the whole system is broken vs. why these refs seem to really be picking on Arsenal this season. I've landed on this…
Two things make football tick:
A standardized set of rules that are executed consistently
A set of unwritten refereeing norms that fans, players, pundits, and refs all agree upon
This approach is how business and society at large works. A norm in a democracy is the peaceful transfer of power, a rule is the length of term. Norms exist as a sort of shared values system; breaching them tends to come with social consequences of some sort, and the breachers tend not to last long.
The issue we're facing with PGMOL, at its core, is that the referees do not operate within a system of accountability (no one gets fired), and the level of narcissism is so extreme, they are impervious to the shame associated with breaching the norms.
What we are witnessing is not incompetence, it's a god complex that is out of control. These decisions aren’t incompetence, they are a show of power. You have to want to make decisions this bad. We are not looking at marginal calls, we are looking at horrendous acts of decision-making violence designed to send a message.
PGMOL are taking rules to extremes to punish teams they don't like and are taking arbitrary liberties with football culture norms to scuttle out of punishing teams they do like.
Michael Oliver, against Manchester City last season, allowed Kovacic to make a studs-up challenge on Martin Odegaard that received a yellow, but moments later when he did the same thing to Declan Rice, there was no second yellow. Why?
'He didn't want to ruin the game.'
This is Michael Oliver taking a norm to an extreme to forgive a team he likes. Note, he took freelance work in December 2022 from a country that owns Manchester City, which is an incredible conflict of interest. But what makes it all worse is that in 50 games, he hasn't awarded them a single red. That makes stretching norms to preserve the integrity of a big game all the more concerning.
The same referee also takes extreme views on rules when he wants to punish teams by unearthing absolutist views on how to interpret incidents. In American law, they call literal interpretation of the text of a law ‘textualism.’
‘Textualists avoid considering factors like the intent of the lawmakers or broader societal implications, focusing instead on the actual wording of the text.‘
Oliver sent Martinelli off with two yellows in the same segment of play. By the letter of the law, that was possible, but no one has ever done that before because a norm in football is that you’re only punished once for the first foul (unless there’s a punch after). A shocking textualist interpretation. Never been seen before, never seen again.
At the start of the season, he sent Trossard off for kicking the ball away, against Manchester City, in the first half of the game in injury time. If you were looking for clear holes in this man's guiding principles, you only have to look at how he decided that preserving a game's integrity was only necessary if it was preserving Manchester City's right to a fair game. When it's Arsenal on the chopping block, this man forgets the norms and goes straight textualist.
In 55 games, he has given Arsenal 8 red cards.
Arsenal are not a dirty team, but looking at that table, you can see that we have the highest penalty per game numbers, the highest yellow card numbers, and the highest red card numbers. Look at Manchester City's numbers.
Michael Oliver didn't make the MLS decision because he's incompetent; he made that decision because he wanted to make it. He has a god complex. It is more important for him to leave his impression on a team he clearly doesn't like than to let the games play out naturally over the course of a season.
We're now the most red-carded team in the league. All of the offenses have been harsh or totally inexplicable. Referees are spoiling the spectacle of the Premier League. What could have been a spectacular title race is now, at best, an 85% chance of a Liverpool win. Not based on Arsenal being poor, but because we've been robbed by referees who are accountable to no one.
So what can be done that I haven't written about?
My preference right now, because I'm angry, is this: If you believe the court adjudicating your case has been corrupted by bias, you take your case to the court of public opinion. Airing our grievances in private has not moved the needle. How much worse can decision-making get than today? Our season has been destroyed while we try to do things behind closed doors.
My answer? Go full-on Mourinho in Turkey. He has railed against refs. He has called them out directly. It is not pleasant to watch, but it is very hard to make bad decisions against his sides when he is basically saying any wrong move is a sign of corruption.
Why doesn't Arteta call these people out? Leak the dossiers they have to the media. Bang the table in the press conference before the game and ask the difficult questions. Put the spotlight on the sh*tty reffing BEFORE it happens. Delivery sleepless nights to those officials like Alex Ferguson, Klopp, and Pep could.
The second thing I haven't really written about: It's clear that PGMOL gets away with what they do because the Premier League clubs are not organized. There are a lot of cliques. Many beefs. Not a lot of trust. Limited alignment.
Arsenal should be bringing clubs together around an improvement plan. They should use social media data and show how much of the Premier League conversation is now dominated by bad refereeing (105,000 negative comments about the MLS penalty). They should point to F1 ratings tanking when fans no longer believed in the fairness of the product. Their data people should highlight how damaging a boring Premier League campaign can be for the brand of the league. They should act in unison against a union that is not fit for purpose and force change. I have seen a million: ‘I hate Arsenal, but that was shocking’ messages on social media. If collectively, you have agreement across fan bases that this is ridiculous, surely you can get an agreement with clubs?
But… here’s the beauty of my writing today. We are not the victims. We won. Michael Oliver lost the battle and judging by the reaction, he might lose the war. This could be a tipping point. But, my ask of you today... lead with ARSENAL WERE GREAT. Don’t let these refs ruin your experience of football. Enjoy the win and lets look forward to a MEGA Man City game next weekend.
Also… there’s a bit of bonus content for you today. I might whine a lot about refs, but I also have a plan to fix PGMOL. So take a read if you are interested. It’s quite a simple plan that I think the league could get running inside 2 years. Let me know what you think in the comments and please check out the AOP On The Whistle at the bottom of the post. xxx
6 POINT PLAN TO FIX PGMOL(full version)
Create an Elite Premier League Referee Body
PGMOL needs to be disbanded for Premier League games. It can stay with EFL. The Premier League needs to set up an elite body of referees and have the entity run by a non-partisan referee with change management experience. This body will be able to start from scratch. The big shift? The body will be able to pick off the best managers from around the world. Yes, more foreign referees. The most monied league in the world should have the pick of the drama-free Champions League refs.
Create a Separate Body for VAR
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 consistently get it wrong.
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 a 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 want accurate decisions and some 'co-equal branches of government' type structure. My VAR nerds will be equals in this new world.
If you don't like this idea, remember this: An unofficial punishment for on-pitch refs is to make them VAR refs for games. It's like being made to do the dishes in a restaurant. No wonder it's so bad.
Independent Auditor
I don't want Northwest refs on Northwest derbies.
I don't want Liverpool fans on VAR for Arsenal games, influencing red cards that take our best players out of games against… Liverpool.
If a referee has taken money for freelance work from a state that owns a club, I want the referee suspended or sacked for damaging the integrity of Elite Referees Inc. If they come back, they should not be allowed to ref games that have anything to do with the success of that club. I cannot have refs thinking about their retirement gigs when they're making decisions in the now.
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. If there is a video going around of a referee calling a top-tier manager a cunt, my auditor is going to know about it, and take action before it gets into the hands of a newspaper.
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 handsome 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.
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