13/09/2026
🗣️ I wrote this earlier in the year on the problem with the PGMOL.
Has anything changed since 6 months ago? Absolutely. They have… erm.. Rebranded to ‘Pro Ref’. And that’s about it.
The level of incompetence unfortunately stays the same.
Worth a re-read if you feel like it 👍
🇾🇪 The PGMOL Problem: What the Premier League Must Do
Friday night at the Vitality Stadium sums up everything that is wrong with PGMOL in two moments separated by minutes. Amad Diallo is wrestled to the ground inside the penalty area, with two hands on him and no attempt to play the ball. Attwell waves play on and VAR does not intervene. Then, Harry Maguire makes near-identical contact with Evanilson at the other end. Penalty. Red card. 2-2.
"For him to give one penalty and not the other… I find it crazy," Carrick said. "One of them must be wrong." Bruno hit the nail on the head: "Either one is a penalty and the other one too, or none of them is a penalty."
United will now file a formal complaint with Howard Webb. But the damage is done and the points, as always, will not be coming back.
🔴 25 Years and Counting
The Professional Game Match Officials Limited was founded in April 2001 with one central purpose, to improve officiating standards in English professional football. It was a landmark moment. England became the first country in the world to fully professionalise its referees. The idea was that if refereeing was treated like a real profession, with proper training, analysis, and support structures, the standard would rise accordingly.
Twenty-five years later, the question that has to be asked honestly and without diplomatic softening is whether PGMOL has delivered on that founding promise.
The evidence is not encouraging. A large and growing number of managers, players, and supporters have been raising serious concerns about officiating standards for years. The introduction of VAR in 2019 was supposed to be the answer with technology stepping in where human judgement failed. Instead, it introduced an entirely new layer of controversy, delay, and disbelief, forcing PGMOL to spent time issuing apologies, dropping officials, and appearing on tv to explain why the latest disaster happened.
⚪️ The Apologies Factory
The most remarkable and troubling feature of PGMOL under Howard Webb's tenure is the regularity with which Webb himself has had to appear on camera to acknowledge errors. A governing body doing this occasionally is one thing. When it becomes a recurring fixture of the football calendar, something is structurally wrong.
Liverpool vs Tottenham, September 2023
This remains one of the most staggering VAR failures in Premier League history. Luis Díaz scored a legitimate goal, clearly onside, the VAR lines confirmed it. But VAR official Darren England became confused about what the on-field decision actually was, believing the referee had awarded the goal when in fact the flag had gone up for offside. He told the referee the check was complete. The goal was disallowed. Liverpool lost 2-1 and finished the game with nine men.
PGMOL acknowledged a "significant human error" after the final whistle. The released audio from the VAR room later revealed the chaos unfolding at Stockley Park, a replay operator urging a correction while England kept insisting nothing could be done because the game had already restarted. Both England and his assistant were stood down from subsequent fixtures, but Liverpool's points were not returned. As Klopp said at the time, "Who does that help now?"
It was also later reported that England and his VAR partner had officiated a match in the UAE just 48 hours earlier, flying back to the UK with minimal recovery time before taking charge of one of the most high-profile games of the weekend. PGMOL subsequently banned its referees from taking paid moonlighting work in the Middle East in September 2024, a decision that raised its own uncomfortable questions about how such conflicts of interest had been permitted in the first place.
Manchester United vs Wolves, August 2023
On the opening day of the 2023-24 season, André Onana came rushing out of his goal and bulldozed into Sasa Kalajdzic in stoppage time. Wolves were trailing 1-0. Neither the referee Simon Hooper nor VAR Michael Salisbury intervened. PGMOL's Jon Moss contacted Wolves manager Gary O'Neil immediately after the final whistle and told him it was a "blatant penalty" that should have been given. Webb himself then contacted the club separately to offer his own apology. Hooper, Salisbury, and VAR assistant Richard West were all dropped from the following round of fixtures.
Digne handball, August 2022
n an early sign of things to come under Webb, a VAR check convinced referee Andy Madley to award a penalty against Aston Villa for a supposed handball by Lucas Digne at Crystal Palace. Webb later had to apologise for it.
Brentford vs Nottingham Forest
VAR somehow spotted contact between Dean Henderson and Yoanne Wissa at the City Ground and awarded Brentford a penalty, despite the pair having barely touched. Wissa appeared to have initiated the contact himself. Webb apologised again.
Fulham vs Chelsea, August 2025
This one opened the current season. Josh King, 18 years old, turned and scored his first Premier League goal for his boyhood club at Stamford Bridge. VAR official Michael Salisbury instructed referee Rob Jones to review the build-up, claiming a foul by Rodrigo Muniz on Trevoh Chalobah. Jones overturned his own on-field decision. Fulham lost 2-0. Webb contacted Fulham the same day to apologise, acknowledged that "guidance wasn't followed properly," and admitted flatly: "It wasn't controversial, it was wrong." Salisbury was removed from his next appointment. Again, no points were returned.
Aston Villa vs Manchester United free-kick wall
Lucas Digne scored a free-kick at Villa Park in November 2022 and PGMOL apologised to Manchester United because referee Anthony Taylor had set the wall too far back, giving Digne extra room. Christian Eriksen had pointed this out to Taylor before the kick was taken and was ignored. Webb later apologised.
Myles Lewis-Skelly, Arsenal vs Wolves, January 2025
Referee Michael Oliver sent off the Arsenal defender for what appeared to the overwhelming majority of observers, including multiple former referees, to be a yellow card offence at most. VAR Darren England checked the decision and confirmed it. Arsenal appealed. An independent panel, unanimous in their verdict, ruled it was wrongful dismissal and overturned the ban. Webb later conceded the red was excessive.
PGMOL had initially defended Oliver's decision publicly before the appeal overturned it, another example of the organisation's instinct to close ranks first and acknowledge reality second.
That last one is particularly troublesome. PGMOL backed the call. Said it was high, said it was late, said video evidence supported the decision. Only when an independent commission unanimously disagreed did the language quietly shift.
⚫️ A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
Taken individually, each of these incidents has an explanation. Overthought it. Guidance wasn't followed. Human error. Crossed wires in the VAR room. But taken together, they reveal a systemic failure to get high-stakes decisions right, compounded by an accountability structure that produces apologies instead of consequences.
Former Premier League referee Mark Clattenburg, who refereed in the top flight for 13 years, put it bluntly after the Newcastle vs Arsenal controversy in September 2025: "Another match where we are discussing the standards of refereeing in the Premier League. Time for Webb to accept he has failed."
The Bournemouth game sits in this context. When Amad is wrestled to the ground and VAR doesn't act, and then a near-identical incident at the other end results in a red card and a penalty within minutes of each other in the same game, you are watching the accumulated product of a system that does not have the training, the standards, or the accountability to consistently get the most important decisions right.
United's players knew it immediately. Carrick knew it. Every supporter watching knew it. The question, as always, is what happens next, and the answer, as always, seems to be yet another apology from Webb.
🔴 Time for a New Structure
The Premier League is the most watched domestic football league in the world. It generates revenues that dwarf every other competition on the planet. It has the institutional weight and commercial power to demand far more than it currently accepts.
PGMOL is funded by the Premier League, the EFL, and the FA, and answers to all three. That sounds like strong governance on paper. In practice, it creates a diffuse accountability structure where no single stakeholder has the leverage or the mandate to drive real change. The clubs that suffer the consequences of poor decisions and fund the operation through their league fees are the furthest removed from the people making and reviewing those decisions.
The case for the Premier League creating its own officiating body, one that answers directly to the PL Board, with an independent head appointed by the league rather than agreed upon by multiple competing bodies, is surely a logical response to 25 years of evidence that the current model is not working.
Consider what a properly structured Premier League officiating body could look like in practice.
Real accountability
When the head of officiating answers directly to the Premier League, the feedback loop becomes far tighter. An error that costs a club points isn't absorbed with a press statement, it triggers a formal review with a public outcome, and officials who repeatedly underperform face genuine consequences rather than a temporary removal from one or two fixtures.
Competitive salaries and European recruitment
The Premier League could offer salaries capable of attracting the best referees from across Europe. There are excellent officials in Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Bringing them in would raise the immediate standard and create genuine competition, the kind that forces domestic referees to improve or be replaced. A larger, more talented pool of candidates would also strengthen the development pipeline for the next generation of English officials.
A genuine promotion and relegation system for referees
No other performance-based profession is immune from the consequences of poor performance. Officials should face the same accountability as players and managers. A transparent ranking system built on independent performance data, with real implications for appointment levels, would create incentives that currently do not exist.
Live transparency
After controversial decisions, a brief, clear explanation from the VAR, broadcast into the stadium and on tv, would go an enormous way toward rebuilding trust. Rugby union has demonstrated this is entirely workable. Fans do not always agree with decisions, but they tend to accept them far more readily when they understand the reasoning. Football has chosen opacity. The Premier League could choose something better.
Post-match accountability
After high-controversy games, the relevant officials should be required to provide a written or verbal explanation of the key calls. Not a press conference, just clarity. The current model, where officials are never publicly accountable in real time and where Mic'd Up arrives weeks after the fact, is not transparency.
⚪️ The Journalism Problem
There is a kind of football writing that doesn't serve the sport. It was on full display the morning after the Bournemouth result. When Manchester United announced they would be filing a formal complaint to PGMOL, Telegraph journalist Matt Law responded on social media with: "Manchester United complaining about penalties 🤣🤣"
A winger was wrestled to the ground with no attempt to play the ball. VAR, with multiple camera angles, failed to intervene. Minutes later, a near-identical incident at the other end resulted in a red card and a penalty that earned the opposition a draw. A club raised a formal complaint about the inconsistency. A journalist responded with laughing emojis.
The implicit message is basically “because it's Manchester United, the error doesn't matter. So a formal complaint is worthy of ridicule rather than scrutiny.”
For us United supporters, this is the usual exhausting double standard that gets applied when our club is on the wrong end of a bad decision. Other clubs' grievances are treated as legitimate. United's grievances are treated as moaning. Never mind that the complaint has merit.
Among supporters of rival clubs, this kind of mockery is entirely human. It's tribal, it's what people do. Nobody expects objectivity from a lifelong fan of another club. But for a journalist, someone paid to report on and analyse the sport, to use a legitimate officiating complaint as material for social media engagement is a failure of basic professional responsibility. It turns a serious structural issue into a punchline, and it makes the real conversation harder to have.
The real conversation is that the PGMOL is not performing to an acceptable standard, and clubs across the Premier League are suffering real, quantifiable consequences. That conversation affects every club. It deserves serious treatment, not laughing emojis.
⚫️ VAR Is Not the Problem
There will always be voices calling for VAR to be scrapped entirely. After another evening of missed calls and maddening inconsistency, the feeling is entirely understandable. But the argument doesn't hold up.
The technology itself works. Multiple camera angles, freeze-frame analysis, offside overlay tools, these things do exactly what they are designed to do. Since VAR was introduced, the accuracy of key match incident decisions increased significantly, precisely because the technology catches things the human eye cannot, in real time, from a single angle.
The Amad incident at Bournemouth was not a technology failure either. The cameras were there. The failure was in the judgement of the people watching those cameras, who decided, rightly or wrongly, that the contact was insufficient to overturn the on-field decision, and then saw an almost identical incident minutes later where the on-field decision went the other way. That is a human failure of consistency and not an argument against technology.
When two near-identical fouls in the same match produce completely opposite outcomes, that is a failure of human application, and it is precisely the kind of failure a better-structured, more accountable officiating body would be forced to confront.
🔴 We Are Not Imagining It
There is a particular exhaustion that comes with watching your club be on the wrong end of a significant decision and then watching sections of the media treat your frustration as a joke. We are not imagining the inconsistency. The game on Friday night produced, within a single half, one of the clearest examples of officiating double standards this season, and no amount of laughing emojis changes that.
We aren’t asking for all decisions to go our way. We just want the same consistency to apply to every team in the league, e.g. the same consistency that Fulham deserved when Josh King's goal was disallowed at Chelsea.
These things happen to clubs all across the Premier League. The difference on Friday night was that it happened twice, in the same game, to contradictory outcomes, within minutes of each other. That is not a matter of interpretation. That is, as Michael Carrick put it, simply astonishing.
⚪️ Time For Change
PGMOL was given a clear mandate in 2001: raise the standard of officiating in English football. After 25 years of professionalisation, the introduction of VAR technology, independent review panels, and more apologies than anyone cares to count, too many clubs are still being asked to absorb wrong decisions and move on with nothing but a letter from Howard Webb in return. After a quarter of a century, why should this level of incompetence remain acceptable by the Premier League? Surely, 25 years is long enough for an organisation to get its act together and improve?
This is a clear case of incompetence, and the Premier League has the power to demand better. It has the institutional leverage to build something that is more accountable, more transparent, more ambitious in its recruitment, and more directly answerable to the clubs and supporters who fund and sustain the league.
It's time for them to grow a backbone, and make a positive change.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. As always, please feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments below.
