Premier League faces calls to increase funding for cash-strapped PGMOL | Premier League

He Premier League faces demands to increase funding for referees due to a cash shortfall at Professional Game Match Officials Ltd.

The Guardian has learned that PGMOL's cash reserves have declined from about £4m to almost zero in recent years as a result of rising training and operations costs, exacerbated by the Introduction and growth of VAR.

The PGMOL's annual budget of around £25m is thought to be enough to see it through this season, but additional funding will be needed next year. The Premier League, English Football League and Football Association all contribute to the refereeing budget, with the top flight providing the largest share.

Negotiations to increase funding for next season are underway and sources with knowledge of the discussions told the Guardian they were confident the issue would be resolved.

In recent years the PGMOL has spent more than budgeted as costs have risen and has privately admitted that it needs to exercise greater financial discipline. However, relations between the main stakeholders are good, particularly since the appointment of Howard Webb as director of refereeing two years ago, and it is hoped that a deal can be reached before the end of the season.

If the extra money does not come in, PGMOL would have to cut its training programs, raising concerns about the time it takes to develop top-level referees and the lack of diversity among match officials.

PGMOL officials are concerned about the lack of diversity, a problem they fear will get worse if they are unable to implement more accelerated training programmes. All 21 Select Group 1 referees who take charge of Premier League matches are white men, although the situation is slightly better in the EFL, with Sam Allison and Rebecca Welch having been promoted to Select Group 2 last summer.

Group 2 referees are occasionally assigned to Premier League matches and both referees made significant progress last season. Allison was the first black referee to take charge of a Premier League match in 15 years when Luton visited Sheffield United the following day, with Welch becoming the top-flight referee. first female referee when Fulham played Burnley three days earlier.

Allison and Welch are considered good enough to referee Premier League matches on a regular basis, but a lack of resources is hampering aspirations to expand the elite pool of referees. Sam Barrott was promoted to Select Group 1 this summer, but with no referees retiring there was no room for further promotions.

“We need to create more turnover in the system and naturally there will be more diversity,” a PGMOL source told the Guardian. “We need to train referees quicker and promote them quicker. At the moment, Premier League referees are all middle-aged white men. There are a lot of good training programmes and initiatives going on but we need to act quicker. It’s not a big problem at the moment but we need to solve the funding problem. The only options left are to make cuts and that would make things worse.”

The geographical concentration of Premier League referees is also a cause for concern. In Select Group 1, Tim Robinson is the only referee from south London and Swindon fans Simon Hooper and Graham Scott are the only referees from south Birmingham.

With the exception of Australian Jarred Gillett, the vast majority of the rest of the Premier League referees are from Yorkshire and the North West. While this has not created problems for match appointments, there are concerns within the PGMOL that the increased focus on who referees support could lead to problems.

The FA accused Nottingham Forest of inappropriate conduct last season after complaining that “the VAR (Stuart Attwell) is a Luton fanatic” after they were denied three penalties in a 2-0 defeat against EvertonForest and Luton were battling to avoid relegation and the East Midlands club claimed Attwell's loyalty should have been taken into account.

PGMOL is working with other stakeholders to increase the number of referees and increase diversity but believes more urgency is needed. The Premier League-funded Elite Referee Development Scheme was launched in 2022 to help referees from underrepresented backgrounds break into the top echelons of the professional game.

The PGMOL and PFA announced a plan this summer to fast-track 12 former players into refereeing, with more than 120 of them applying to be part of the first cohort. At a lower level, the FA is running the CORE X programme, which aims to recruit and retain 1,000 new referees from a variety of backgrounds over the next three years. That scheme is aimed at referees actively officiating in the third or fourth division of women’s football, or in the seventh and eighth divisions of men’s football.