By Tony Attwood
Another week, another reason for Arsenal to collapse and vanish from the title, FA Cup and Champions League competitions, if not without a trace, then at least without any thought of Arsenal ever being serious competitors.
The latest approach is summarised in the article [The ghost of April’s past:](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/mar/23/is-arsenals-title-anxiety-returning) is Arsenal’s title anxiety returning? An article that appeared after a weekend in which Arsenal did not play a league match.
Now that article goes on to say, “[Claims that victory](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/mar/23/nico-oreilly-believes-wembley-glory-carabao-cup-reignite-manchester-city-title-bid-arsenal) in this final could be a huge psychological blow in the title race are perhaps a little fanciful.” And notice “perhaps”. And who made such claims? Why, the media, of course. So in short, we have a headline that is immediately seen as “perhaps a little fanciful”. So why include it? Well, basically because the rule is, if you can knock Arsenal in a newspaper, do it. In this case, shame on the Guardian, but I doubt that shame will cause them to change their approach to negative reporting.
It is as if there is a belief that if Arsenal have lost a match, there is nothing that can be done to undo that fact. And across the newspaers the feeling is that one loss to Manchester City, in which Arsenal deigned to give their backup keeper a run out, means the future can be foretold. The team has lost, that is not going to be undone, and can be used as a guide to the future.
What makes this interesting is that while numerous people can see something is quite seriously wrong with the refereeing in English football, although the newspapers won’t mention that, so the media can see something very wrong with Arsenal, and feel the need to mention this over and over.
Of course, the main escape that the PGMO has is that since everyone is complaining, the complaints are purely parochial – team A plays team B and both sets of supporters complain, so most likely the ref was all right, and the fans have no idea what he they are talking about.
But for years and years, we have been showing that there is something much deeper going on. It started off with the regular referee reviews that Walter Broeckx undertook for covering all Premier League matches – and it was immediately clear that there was not a singular issue for Arsenal – it was the standard of refereeing across the league that was terrible.
Unfrotunately PGMO is now backed into a corner of its own making. Their entire stance is that nothing is wrong, (and even if there were something amiss, the only people qualified to deal with the issue is PGMO). It is a bit like a monarch saying, “I am the law” at a time when no one can question that.
The problem is that the edifice will crumble eventually, and when it does, it is likely to bring down the credibility of the whole of the Premier League with it, because it will be recognised that so many of the results of matches in the top division are, in fact, as much down to the referee as to the teams.
The media refuse to accept that referees can make multiple errors, and so they will not report the possibility – presumably because the PGMO have told them not to.
And the big problem is quite simply that PGMO, through its dictatorship of control, does not allow any form of public discussion. If you know your history, think back to the days when England was run by a monarch. No one could question the monarch, so no one did. That is where we are with refereeing.
The quality of refereeing does not appear to have gone up, and the level of secrecy around all issues relating to the PGMO has not changed.
One of the key issues here, of course, is that the mass media appear to have signed agreements with PGMO that they will not criticise the referees That agreement seems to be solid, and that agreement is, of course, the absolute block. The BBC has in the past even sacked match commentators and reviewers for criticising referees. No one in a club can criticise the referee, while the media are under a strict arrangement that says they will not use their columns to criticise the behaviour of the referees.
In short, we have managed to get nowhere, although we will keep on trying.
Except, there has been one change in that the level of complaints against referees made by people who have been at games is growing And growing. When we started Untold Arsenal, it was just our blog, courtesy of the analyses conducted by referee Walter Broeckx that focused on the way referees worked. Walter has taken a well-earned retirement from writing, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the problems he noticed have increased.
And that is the key issue for football at the moment. The refusal of the Premier League to take any action while the PGMO refuses to allow any discussion about refereeing, how often the same referee sees the same teams, how much spectator dissatisfaction there is with refereeing, etc etc. The situation is getting worse. And ultimately, there can be no doubt that the time will come when the clubs have to say, no more. There are just too many farceical moments in games, and too many paying customers who are seeing the match they have watched as a farce.
Our solution – to limit each ref to no more than two games involving each team in the league in a season – would not solve everything, but it would reduce the impact of the problem on individual teams. But no one wants to mention that.