We delayed the release of the latest Bum Ref Index due to the astonishingly inept lack of professionalism demonstrated by the match officials of the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) at the weekend. It would have been inappropriate to post an incomplete picture.
Before we assess the Dirty Dozen, the twelve referees who are particularly culpable in the undermining of the integrity of the English top flight game, lets check out some holistics.
* In Britain, there have been 100 "live" matches covered by Sky Television or Setanta so far this season. 90 of these matches have been officiated by the Dirty Dozen. In direct comparison, Howard Webb has refereed 15 live games while Dowd, Mason, Rennie, Stroud and Probert have cumulatively amassed 6 games. As Webb's position in the hierarchy of unprofessionalism demonstrates, the man does not warrant this status.
* The most complete turnaround has been the pirouette performed by Thailand's Mark Clattenburg - last season, Clattenburg was the least bad official while this year he is the baddest. Lets trawl back through Clattenburg's ramblings in February:
24/02 Blackburn v Bolton - Two penalty decisions, one incorrect, and a disallowed goal.
09/02 West Ham v Birmingham - Incorrect penalty and a sending off that was so ludicrous that it was later reversed on appeal.
02/02 Spurs v Man Utd - 10 bookings in a moderately physical game including seven United players as Clattenburg targeted the banning of Rooney from the Manchester derby.
Clattenburg was stood down for a fortnight following his crooked officiating of the Merseyside derby in October and was not given another live match by the PGMOB for over three months. Three months is not enough. Clattenburg has officiated three Man Utd matches this season resulting in 1 point for the Reds plus a Rooney ban; Clattenburg has refereed two Man City matches, both of which have ended in "interesting victories". Corrupt infrastructures frequently produce quantum leaps in the integrity of insiders and Clattenburg's reversal from right-on to rogue is par for this particular course
* As we have mentioned before, control of the live Sky and Setanta matches is so key as the global betting turnovers on these events are orders of magnitude greater than your bog-standard Boro v Reading sort of misery. The fact that the Dirty Dozen referee 90% of these live events is a template seemingly designed with corruption in mind.
* None of the other major territories in Europe do corruption quite like the English. Although the media spin is always on those dastardly Italians and dodgy Germans, it is the Premiership that is, by some distance, the most corrupted league. Other nations face up to the "realities" better than the English too. "If you are telling me that English football is corrupt, you are destroying everything that I've ever believed in" is a common refrain from the myopic fan. Welcome to nihilism, pal... As an example of the media focus on the corruption, check out La Gazzetta dello Sport last Tuesday online. Halfway through the morning, a new headline screamed that Bo Larsen was to referee the Arsenal/Milan Champions League match. There followed a detailed discussion on Larsen which bordered, quite correctly, on forensic psychology in places. Compare and contrast with the difficulty in finding any reliable information regarding the PGMOB and its selection processes. This template seems to allow for an early pencilling in of a team of officials which might require flexibility nearer kick off if betting liabilities demand so. Over the last two seasons, the Premiership additionally saw 4% of games suffer a very late referee change - that is 25 games in 1.75 seasons; in Serie A and the Bundesliga combined there has been one such instance in the same window.
* The underperformance of the match officials is having very serious impacts on the integrity of the league table as well as running a train and carriages through what little integrity the betting markets are able to muster. Some teams are not clear at the top of the Premiership when they should be; some teams are not in the Top 4 when they should be; some teams are in the relegation positions when they shouldn't be. Lets just take a glance at four of last weekend's results and compare with what our software states would have been the outcomes without the impact of the PGMOB manipulators (actual outcome in brackets):
Birmingham v Arsenal - Arsenal (Draw).
Liverpool v Boro - Draw (Liverpool).
Fulham v West Ham - Fulham (West Ham).
Portsmouth v Sunderland - Draw (Portsmouth).
It is not difficult to envisage the impact of incorrect outcomes particularly for teams that have been on the receiving end on a serial basis.
* Season 2007/08 has seen a greater penetration of the assistant referees by some of the key power lobbies within the game. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th officials are becoming increasingly a part of the problem. The two prime assistants may either be legit, working with the match referee, working with the 4th official or be part of a watertight corruption whereas the very key 4th Official has considerable holistic sway over the match frequently alerting the referee to spectacular realities of which he should be made aware.
So, here are the Dirty Dozen counting from the bottom with last year's position in brackets.
19. Clattenburg 5.49 (1)
18. Dean 5.06 (8)
17. Riley 4.85 (6)
16. Styles 4.76 (14)
15. Foy 4.51 (8)
14. Webb 4.48 (15)
13. Dowd 4.28 (13)
12. Marriner 4.25 (-)
11. Wiley 4.21 (16)
10. Bennett 4.16 (12)
9. Halsey 4.10 (2)
8. Tanner 3.70 (-)
In the good old bad old days, referees were known for their bias in club or favouritism by region, race or nationality. The modern format still sees examples of such biases but there are a whole spectrum of other inappropriate inputs which determine the decision making processes on the field of play. It is critical for the corrupt entities to maintain control over match outcome being vested in as small a number of PGMOB referees as possible - twelve is the absolute minimum taking into account injuries, illness and the 4th Official necessities.
All other mainstream sports are utilising technology to attempt to create integrity in outcomes whereas all of the footballing authorities refuse to countenance such evidently sensible technology as video replays of controversial incidents, goalline cameras and open source microphones so that the whistleblowers can explain the "logic" behind their machinations. It is not a coincidence that the most liquid global betting markets are accompanied by the least intrusive technology. Indeed, further randomisers are the order of the day. For example, the moving advertisements whirling around the pitch undoubtedly make the jobs of the linespeople more problematic - when the human eyes are dealing with coincident occurrences and parallax, a plain and still background is definitely preferable.
At the start of this season, the Premier League under the dictatorship of Rich Scudamore announced that the Premiership (the actual league) would, in future, be known as the Premier League. This neat repositioning by Our Great Antisocial Leader allowed the Premier League (the corrupt organisation of the English game's demise) to become equivalent to the Premier League (the branded "best league on the planet Earth"). By hiding away behind the product, Scudamore has been able to do his deals to the detriment of the game without the same degree of scrutiny. Only the 39th Game nonsense has stirred the masses and the media; corruption is evidently okay, not an issue.
We stick to Premier League and Premiership to avoid confusion...
Which brings us to the bit of the post which is not of any interest to football-heads...
The Football Is Fixed Bum Ref Index is very loosely based on The Economists Big Mac Index - the former assesses corruption in English football while the latter assesses the geopolitical corruption inherent in the financial system; the former exposes the corruption machinations while the latter creates nonsensical mathematics to justify the indefensible.
The Big Mac Index is based on purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP is the only mathematical machination which is able to demonstrate, if distorted from reality to a great enough extent, that there is a way of looking at the global economic system which shows that the poorest are seeing an improvement to their dreadful existences. Of course, PPP is not robust and it might better be perceived as a sleight of hand rather than a statistical analysis. PPP "works" by comparing the prices of identical products across different territories. By comparing these prices, it is possible to "determine" which currencies are under- and over-valued. This is bobbins. The comparison is simply not feasible as income inequality across the planet has resulted in a complete differentiation in the products that consumerism makes available to us dependent on our global economic tier and culture. Mobiles, Big Mac's, cars etc are not interchangeable. Furthermore, the PPP figure is further distorted from its tenuous link to reality by the utilisation of loss leaders in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). To develop addicts and/or to establish market share, first world globalised companies "buy" market presence in the HIPCs by undercutting the opposition (obviously prior to a price rise once the locals have been sublimated). This warping of the "free trade" system has the treble impact of increasing profits for the globalisers in the medium term, removing competition and making the PPP figures suggest that first world products are affordable in the HIPCs.
But this is only a part of the argument. The IMF and the shareholder capitalist think tanks always choose to compare "average" earnings in the HIPCs with the northern hemisphere elites and this is a further fallacious construct. Income inequality is growing across the planet as a psychopathic system does its darnedest to reward the psychopaths. Undoubtedly, there has been growth in India and China but such growth is heavily skewed and the rural poor are even more disenfranchised than prior to the latest imperialist wave of capital - check out the number of rural suicides in both these countries. Additionally, PPP rather undermined its own claims to robustness when "adjustments" marking down growth by 40% in both India and China were released towards the end of 2007. Finally, PPP also warps the upper end of the HIPCs societies. The very skilled eg doctors, lawyers etc can leap some distance up the global hierarchy while everybody else is left with largely futile incremental ladder climbing as they attempt to live the reality that it is better in Chad than in Darfur. Exactly what sort of statistic is this?
At the moment, there is a huge dynamic behind creating the $100 laptop so that the HIPCs may jump several technological layers and, of course, buy in to the products of the first world at the same time. Surely it would be preferable to build classrooms, train teachers, buy schoolbooks etc.
Lyotard describes the fascistic template of globalisation quite clearly as follows: "The needs of the most under-privileged should not be used as a system regulator as a matter of principle: since the means of satisfying them is already known, their actual satisfaction will not improve the system's performance, but only increase its expenditure".
This basic tenet of shareholder capitalism should be remembered the next occasion some econo-conjurer tries to spread their tissue of lies to disguise the endemic cruelty of their system.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
