Mods - I hope this post is allowed as ontopic under the rule wording "financial and legal matters relating to football and football clubs.". It is not about City or Financial Doping and is a new topic. Thanks for your consideration. Football is comprehensively compromised by corruption and exploitation; why is Referring given a free pass? If we break down the facets of football in the world we have several logical layers which have shown corruption Regional layers (club, country, regional and world) The 2015 Department of Justice indictments exposed that FIFA executives operated a decades-long scheme of bribery and kickbacks regarding tournament hosting and broadcasting rights. Organisation/Ownership (players, coaching, management, board, owners, multi-club-owners, investors, sponsors etc) Rise of state owned entities, as well as multi-club ownership models which have circumvented financial regulations (City etc) The pitch itself High-profile players (Tonali, Toney, Paqueta) banned or investigated for betting on their own matches More or less, every layer, every discipline has been corrupted. This is usually in the form of Capital influence. In simple terms, because everyone and everything is usually incentivized by money, money can influence those areas. That influence is corruption - in simple terms. This isn't specific to football, even the worlds most prominent organisations like Government and Heads of State are widely considered to be riddled with corruption vectors. In simple terms, even in Governments, the concept of Lobbying allows people with money to basically corrupt the government to do as it wants. This isn't a conspiracy; it's a formalised fact. Soccer, and football communities all agree on this, but somehow saying "Referees are corrupt" is immune A great deal of controversial refereeing decisions happen throughout all leagues. Rationalising sub-par officiating is a hard and complex thing because a genuine mistake by a referee, who is human, can be seen as "corrupt" or "cheating" or intentional. But generally people wave their hands and it goes something like this: Person A: "Hey is football corrupt?" Football Big Brain: "oh yeah, the clubs? all corrupt man, no question. FIFA itself? yeah basically Mafia at this point, FA? corrupt. All of them are corrupt. All our World Cup bids are bought, everyone knows that. Financial doping, multi-club ownership, buying/selling players, match rigging, players betting" Person A: "Hey I guess Referees are corrupt too right? Maybe being bought or maybe they are biased I guess haha?" Football Big Brain: "What the hell are you talking about, you're a lunatic, conspiracy theorist. Go back to your tinfoil room. What kind of warped logic is that? Don't you know all teams get bad decisions? Dude you should stop spewing things you don't know shit about" Hopefully the message between the lines is clear there. Why is it, that communities so regularly and overwhelmingly accepting of systemic, regular corruption and cheating, logically rationalise that "referees" somehow are some untouchable exclcusion that has never been corrupt? Is there some special dome of light around the Referee camps which influence can't penetrate? Why do we so heavily attack people who discuss Refereeing issues? Why "it happens to all teams" doesn't hold up Firstly, there's first hand precedents of Officiating corruption: Italy (2006) with the Calciopoli scandal showed top club executives actively influencing the selection of favorable referees to rig Serie A Germany (2005): Referee Robert Hoyzer confessed to and was imprisoned for fixing matches Spain: Right now has the Caso Negreira case where Barcelona paid over €7 million to the vice-president of the Spanish refereeing committee over two decades. Whilst bribery charges have been dropped, at the start of this month the investigation phase has finished and "sporting corruption" is still on the cards. We'll hear more soon. Secondly, if the paradigm of "Referees just make mistakes, and all teams are on the receiving end" is a logical explanation. Then the vast body of objective data should support that. It should be impossible that for any given team, that their win% is vastly different depending on the referee they get. It should be impossible that certain teams get more apologies or acknowledged mistakes than others. It should be very unlikely that teams get less or more yellow cards within a reasonable threshold. The problem is, the data doesn't reflect this idea that "it happens equally to all teams" - in fact, the data shows clear anomalies. PGMOL's Key Match Incidents regularly finds glaring anomalies. Actual formal apologies by the PGMOL are disproportionately weighted and not balanced across all teams. Brighton have received 3 formal apologies in the 22-23 season alone. Wolv's got fucked in 23-24. [Mike Dean vs Arsenal] - Arsenal’s baseline win percentage with Wenger hovered around 58-60% but under Mike Dean was around 25%. This kind of statistic shouldn't exist. Liverpool had a similar scenario with Paul Tierney (From Manchester) as well as a disproportionate amount of awarded penalties. Klopp's public complaints were dismissed as conspiratorial or sour unsportsmanship. "Objective" studies like Paul Tomkin's multi-year analysis of "touches in the box vs fouls given" showing a massive favour of teams from Manchester and a heavy bias against Liverpool and Chelsea. At the peak, certain teams got a penalty every 150 touches vs others 400 touches. Websites like this go into details as well I don't want to turn this into a "my team are victims" type post, so I wont link them. But certain teams subreddits also have self-posts where they either do analysis themselves or refer to other ones that have been done into their teams or against certain players. David Coote, an active Premier League ref and his mate were quoted in a video saying things like: "[thoughts on Klopp] ... Cunt, absolute c***" "...I do my best not to speak to him... My God, German c***, fuck me." "Liverpool are all fucking bellends, and we hate Scousers" Indirect bribery (this is the preferred method for bribery in general these days) September 23' in a Thursday (Micheal Oliver, Darren England, Stuart Burt and Dan Cook) were hired by UAE to officiate a game Saturday, Darren England and Dan Cook are back in UK in the VAR room officiating a massive game for the premier league and in particular Manchester Cities likelyhood of winning the league During the game, one of the most objectively clear cut examples of a catastropgic mistake (later admitted) prevented a text-book legal goal for Liverpool leading them to lose the game. It was widely reported Micheal Oliver received £20k for this exhibition game from from Manchester Cities owners. (They typically get 1.5k a game) The travel and hotel were never confirmed but it's typically luxury, all-inclusive, and often business/first-class. The PGMOL (Howard Webb) was forced to issue a formal apology to Liverpool, admitting to a "significant human error" I know this last one sounds like a (biased) and convoluted link. But standard practice Bribery employed globally in all sectors of governance usually employs these "indirect bribes" because they're better hidden. These kinds of weird and "red lines on the wall of pictures" is exactly the normal tactics that financial bribery uses. A recent non football example is how similar methods were found to be used for Nigel Farrage (British Politician) received illegal funds. Where does that leave us? So why does this community, and many others, continue to perpetuate the fallacy that "oh yeah, football? totally corrupt, man. Through and through. Oh, except referees; they're totally not corrupt, and it happens to everyone mate, no need to be a conspiracy theorist, calm down lol" There are at least 3 levels of rationality: Referees are incompetent, not malicious. (Not impossible, but the data doesn't support it) Referees are corrupt (lots of supporting data) Specific conspiracies exist against specific clubs, or in favour of specific teams (This is where the data is more open to interpretation) The first two are a matter of fact. Humans make mistakes, and there's objective, proven examples of refs being corrupt. The third one is contextual and often nuanced. But personally I don't think we can cemently say it never happens and adopt an attitude that "nah there's no conspiracy" This is the state of our modern game. The more we allow these facts to be swept under the rug, the higher risk that our teams will fall victim to it and the more likely that the integrity of the game nose dives.   submitted by   /u/kris_lace [link]   [comments]