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What is wrong with PL refs : a case study. Probert Arsenal have the money, but who is to be purchased? » Why is there collusion between the media and the clubs over the way the Premier League is reported? By Tony Attwood Between 2004 and 2011 Sir Alex Ferguson refused to talk to the BBC, after the Corporation ran a story about his son Jason. It was just one of a series of spats that the man had during his career, and one of a series of occasions when football clubs and the people within them have banned journalists, or refused “co-operation”. At other times Sam Allardyce when at Newcastle and Harry Redknapp when at Portsmouth decided they would not want to have anything to do with the BBC, largely because of their pesky questions about agents and the signing of players. Rather curiously Ferguson, at a Q and A in Glasgow recently also noted very positively that Jock Stein had introduced regular post-match press conferences in Scotland to lessen the impact of what Stein saw as a Rangers-dominated media agenda. Ferguson said that Stein then had the press eating out of his hand. An interesting thought… For it suggests that the press are seen, at least by Ferguson, as good when they do what you want, and bad when they don’t. . It reminds me of a statement I read during the build up to the Rangers tax case affair, and their ultimate disintegration as a club (by which I mean, the old Rangers of the SPL are a different company and different club from the new Rangers who have just won the third division.) The point was made that the press tended to treat Rangers press releases as the Scottish equivalent of investigative journalism. . The issue of the press and the clubs arises every time a football club bans a journalist or indeed a whole organisation – and it highlights a strange relationship between football and the media. . The media does publish some investigations into football – the Observer has a Said and Done column in which it highlights the awful goings on Fifa, and the silly things managers and owners say. A typical example from recent editions: . – complaining of years of “vindictive”, “unholy”, “dirty” press smears for forcing his resignation as a Trinidad MP. . • Italy, 25 Feb: Palermo president Maurizio Zamparini rehires coach Gian Piero Gasperini, 19 days after sacking him. “It was time to act. We were better under Gasperini.” 12 Mar: Zamparini sacks Gasperini and rehires Giuseppe Sannino, who he fired in September. Sannino: “I’ll just take this job one day at a time.” . Ho ho, what funny people these foreign players, managers, Fifa people, are. . The “I’ll never sell the player” comment from a manager, followed a week later by the transfer, is the commonplace of the column, and it makes quite amusing reading occasionally. But the whole piece loses all credibility because it never comments on the stupidity of the stories that papers run about players who will or won’t be transferred, nor does it really take on the issue of clubs that ban journalists. Jack Warnercomplaining of years of “vindictive”, “unholy”, “dirty” press smears for forcing his resignation as a Trinidad MP. Which seems to reveal a sort of schizophrenic attitude on the newspaper’s side – you can make fun of foreign football affairs but you can’t make fun of the media, nor can you reveal too much about clubs. And it is even more interesting when you combine this with the fact that when a club decides to ban a journalist for saying something they don’t like, journalists and the media in general don’t say, “right that’s it, if you want to censor what we write and say, then it is a case of ‘one out all out’,” (as we used to say in the old days). So the media allows itself to be pushed into kow-towing to the clubs is a good thing, because it gives the blogs a chance to set out information that simply isn’t found elsewhere, because the media is to scared to run it. (I am of course thinking of Untold here – but more on that in a moment). The Rangers tax case is a case in point where the bloggers really did take up an issue that the media ignored – presumably because they didn’t want their main source of stories cut off. (Although just to put a bit of balance in this Scottish thing I understand that Celtic have also banned reporters from time to time and again the media has not clubbed together to protest). Apparently in Scotland they also have some press conferences at which questions are not allowed, apparently, and no one argues with that. The media does of course have a huge amount of power in this. If a club bans a journalist or a paper, all the papers, indeed all the media, could just ignore the club. Why not? Well I suppose because they don’t want to have readers turning away because they can’t read about a certain club. Except almost certainly they would not do this. They would not turn away in their billions, because whatever club you take, most football fans don’t like that club. Watch Arsenal Live Streams With StreamFootball.tv So, to give an imaginary example. Newcastle United ban the Telegraph. The Telegraph then in retaliation runs a series of stories about the Newcastle United no one knows. Since most football fans are not Newcastle fans, they would read this, and enjoy it. It would at least show Newcastle that banning a journalist for writing about some disagreement within the club between players, isn’t worth it. I must say that if there were a decision by the united media not to cover Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester United, Celtic, Rangers and anyone else who banned individuals or whole media organisations, the football pages of the papers and the discussions within radio and TV stations, would be much more fun. As it was there was no solidarity and instead Newcastle then went on to ban the Sun also. Marina Hyde of the Guardian is one journalist who has commented on this, and in doing so reports that she asked the FA what David Beckham’s role was within the England during the 2010 World Cup and was told that the answer could only be given off the record!!! . But there’s another issue here, and one that relates to Untold very centrally. Because of this pussy-footing attitude, the media in Britain refuse to carry out any sort of investigation into the situation concerning the refereeing of Premier League matches. . The facts of this case are simple: because of the lack of numbers of referees available for the Premier League the same refs keep refereeing the same clubs, leaving the possibility of corruption open. A simple safety measure against any kind of corruption would be raise the number of referees so that each ref would only get to referee each club twice per season. So if there were any bias it would be removed. . When Untold started to run this story, and started to enquire into the activities of PGMOL (the organisation that is in charge of referees for the Premier League) the BBC took it up, and PGMOL responded by closing down their web site. . These days Untold and Referees Decisions , and the other sites that we have mentioned in the past that also take an interest, take on the issue, on their own, noting as we go that when the referee problem broke out in Italy, one of the revelations was the fact that the media could be bribed by clubs NOT to show or report on bad refereeing decisions within certain games in case it led to unfortunate questions. . Media and Club collusion? Well, if there were, on a large scale, it would explain why when there are banning orders, the media as a whole don’t complain but just get on with reporting football as they see it. . Media and clubs acting together to hide the difficult truths? Surely not. Recent posts Arsenal have the money, but who is to be purchased?

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