The issue of late changes of referee in English football is becoming a serious manipulation in the marketplace (for historical posts, see http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2006/12/fundamentals-1-change-of-referee.html and
http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/01/weekend-premiership-round-up.html).
In other territories, an average of 0.25% of games suffer from this "adjustment"; in England, 5.25% of games are affected. What are the reasons and justifications behind this 20-fold differential?
Firstly, let's look at the impacts on the global football betting markets. Late referee changes frequently undermine professional trading positions for both non-cartel market makers and individual traders (particularly those positions undertaken in the Far East). There was significant difference, for example, in Sunday's Premiership match between Charlton and Newcastle being officiated by Graham Poll (as the PGMOB initially declared) and Dermot Gallagher. Any professional had to alter their trading profile on this event as soon as the change was released. If the change of referee is a few hours prior to kick off then it is easy enough to adjust staking level, terminate a position or address hedging strategies. When the referee is changed very late, it can be difficult off-setting very major earlier positions particularly if you are after a suitable market price. To address these issues, our Trading Team have been forced to limit our early market exposures. There are rumours around that insiders in the English football hierarchy are using this disinformation regarding referees to gain preferable prices for their hidden agenda trades (which are activated just prior to the press release of the alteration). This is similar to a strategy utilised by the Asian bookies in the 90's where they traded Team A around Europe in the early market phases causing the ignorant European layers to significantly adjust their markets. Then the Asians and European professionals would come in massively on Team B at a beneficial price.
Secondly, a very high percentage of these changes of officialdom occur on major turnover live events eg Arsenal versus Manchester United, Tottenham versus Chelsea and Blackburn versus Arsenal. Inevitably, the impact is much greater in such events from a betting market perspective.
Thirdly, the same referees keep cropping up in these events which would suggest that there is a small grouping of officials within the PGMOB roster who might be complicit in these trading manipulations.
Of course, a suitable explanation might be that English referees are simply 20 times more likely to get ill, have travel difficulties or get injured in the pre-match warm-up. Statistics suggest otherwise.
World Cup and Euro Qualifiers, Champions League and UEFA Cup matches involve extensive travelling, exposing oneself to the viruses and bugs of a foreign land and disruption to pre-match warm-ups routines due to climate, pitch condition etc. In the whole of the time that I have been trading these markets, I have never yet seen a change of referee. That's in 15 years...
This puts the two changes out of 12 English games over the weekend into perspective.
Perhaps there is a manipulative market opportunity here. The corrupted British layers could establish markets on who is going to officiate at the weekend's games. Then they can cream a profit off mugs as well as undermining professionals while retaining ultimate control of outcome. Perfect psychopathy...
