THE REFEREE
PGMOL hired an arsonist to run the fire service
It is the sixth of October and I am writing about referees again, which is exactly what they want, because every column about a bad decision is a column that is not about their appointment, and the timing of that appointment, and the utter, dripping contempt with which it has been carried out. We have been on the wrong end of three match-altering calls in nine days. One of them was a handball the VAR official was promoted for spotting last season. The new head of PGMOL, announced in the summer, was hired after a process that excluded the club most often on the wrong end of the audit. This is what we are. A club that pays the wages, and gets cooked for the privilege. I am not neutral. I am a Tottenham fan. I am also not stupid, and I would like a word with the room.
The Wolves handball and the small print
Saturday at the Lane. One one, seventy eight minutes, Pedro Porro clips a cross and the ball clearly, measurably, by every available geometry, strikes the arm of a Wolves defender who has it raised, extended, away from his body, in the direction of the ball. Andre Marriner, the on field official, does not give it. Jarred Gillett, on VAR, does not send him to the screen. We lose the game two one. By the time the highlights cycle has run twice, Wolves' second goal is already being defended on punditry desks as a response to our pressure. The story is over. We are the losers, the moaners, the ones who cannot take it.
But the story is not over. The story is that the handball guidance was changed at the end of last season, formally, in writing, by the IFAB panel that PGMOL's new technical director sat on. The change was sold as a clarification. The clarification, in plain English, is that a defender with his arm in that position has materially enlarged his body. The previous refereeing cohort applied this guidance in the opening month of the season. The current cohort, post appointment, has reverted to the older, handier interpretation. I am not imagining a pattern. I am reading the guidance, and the games, side by side, and the pattern is pointing at us.
We have written about this before, and the response then was that we were being conspiratorial, that the data would settle it, that the league does not want us to win is a feeling, not a finding. The data, as of this morning, has a name on it. Tottenham Hotspur. The Wolves handball is the seventh penalty area decision to go against us in the first eight games. That is not variance. Variance does not wear a club badge.
The appointment nobody got to vote on
In July, PGMOL announced a new leadership structure. A former FIFA official was brought in as the head of the new technical directorate, with a remit to professionalise recruitment, training, and audit. The framing was reassuring. Modern, transparent, accountable. A new era. The kind of language that gets the front page and buries the second.
Here is the second paragraph. The appointment was made by a panel of eight. Of those eight, four are currently employed by clubs in the so called big six. None of them are employed by us. The panel did not consult supporter groups. The panel did not publish a job description. The panel did not, at any point, ask the club that has finished seventh, fourth, fifth, seventh, fourth, eighth, fifth, and fifth in the eight seasons since the audit was introduced, what we thought the problem was. We are the audit. We are the dataset. We are not on the panel.
I want to be careful here, because I have been a Tottenham fan long enough to know how this sounds. It sounds like sour grapes. It sounds like a fanbase that cannot tell the difference between a bad call and a vendetta. I have made that accusation myself, in private, about other fanbases. So let me be specific. The new PGMOL structure does not publish the names of officials assigned to each club's games. It does not publish, in any form a supporter can access, the criteria by which those assignments are made. It does not publish the results of the in season audit. The body that owes us, the clubs, the supporters, the public, the most transparency, is the body that is the most opaque. The new leadership has been in place for ninety days. In that window, the only concrete change a fan can identify is the tone of the weekly notes, which is now friendlier, and the length of the refereeing review column in Programmes Monthly, which is now shorter.
This is not a reform. This is a rebrand.
What an audit would actually look like
I am going to do the audit PGMOL will not, because the data is not secret, it is just inconvenient, and inconvenient data is the only kind worth printing. Across the first eight matchweeks of the 2026-27 season, Tottenham have had seven penalty area decisions go against them. Of those seven, three were handball incidents where the offending arm was in a position the IFAB guidance, in writing, says should be a penalty. One was a foul on Richarlison in the build up to a goal that stood. One was a wrongly disallowed equaliser at the Etihad, where the assistant's flag went up thirty seconds after the cross, which is a timing that should not be possible at this level. One was a free kick given the other way for a tackle that the new guidance, again in writing, says is a legitimate challenge. One was a red card rescinded on appeal for a player who had been booked three times in the previous forty minutes, which is not an incident, it is a warning system.
Across the same eight matchweeks, the average for the rest of the league is 2.3 penalty area decisions per club. We are at seven. The next highest is four. The next highest is Brighton. The next highest is, interestingly, the club whose head of football sits on the PGMOL appointments panel.
I want to be wrong about this. I want someone at the league, anyone, to publish the figures, attribute them, and let me be wrong in public. I will take that L. I will write the column. I will hand the receipts back. I have done it before. I did it when I thought the Robbo red at Anfield in 2024 was a red, and I wrote that column the next morning, and a few of you were angry with me for a week. I will do it again. But I cannot be wrong about a body that will not show me the figures.
The fans are not the problem, the structure is
The easy line, the one that gets the headlines and the Sky Sports segment, is that Spurs fans are obsessed, that we see conspiracy in every dropped flag, that the away end at the Etihad has a banner for every grievance. I have made that banner. I have been that away end. I am not going to apologise for it. But the banner is not the problem. The banner is the symptom. The problem is the body that has not, in five years of audited data, ever once written a public paragraph explaining why a club that finishes in the same band, with the same squad age profile, with the same kind of possession football, gets a different distribution of marginal calls. The body has not done that because the body cannot do that without admitting what the data shows.
So here is the column they want me not to write. PGMOL hired an arsonist to run the fire service. The arsonist was drawn from the same circle that has run the service for a decade. The audit will be the same audit. The column from the league office will use the same six words in the same order, and the column from this site will use the same six facts in the same order, and we will go around again, and again, and again, until someone, somewhere, with actual authority, breaks the loop. This is the one they don't want us to win. That is not a metaphor. That is the job.
Write to your club. Write to your MP. Write to the Premier League, in the polite, specific, evidenced way I have asked you to write before, and I will ask you again. The Wolves handball is a decision. The Wolves handball inside a structure that has decided, in plain sight, not to be transparent, is a verdict. We are not the only fans who can read.