Var-cical decision puts independence of PGMOL individuals in question

 

Newcastle 1 Arsenal 0   
Premier League   
Saturday 4th November 2023 5.30pm    

I am away for a few days for work and the timing of my commitments / workload means I was unable to catch the game yesterday and will not have two hours to watch the replay in full until I am back in London on the day of the Sevilla game. So I watched nine minutes of highlights and will simply write briefly on a discussion point that came out of the match.

 

A friend messaged me with the following after the game -
Maybe I’m paranoid but the “unlimited money” teams seem to benefit a lot from VAR. And I don’t mean just directly. Maybe coincidence. I’d like to see a study on it to (hopefully) assuage my paranoia.

 

A couple of articles worth reading in relation to this from firstly The Guardian and then this from a Danish website

 

In terms of regulation in the Premier League, a quote from the Guardian article sums it up nicely…
“And then there’s Rumayyan (Newcastle's chairman), a member of the Saudi PIF (Public Investment Fund), who among his many other directorships, is chairman of Aramco, the Saudi state oil company. When he meets people as chairman of Newcastle United, he does so with greater power than perhaps any club director has ever wielded before. Asking Masters (Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters) to regulate him is like asking a leg of lamb to regulate a lion.”

 

Everyone has their price. And indeed those with money can be very persuasive not only with cash but also the implications of refusing it. The world is a dark place sometimes, and I have to be a bit careful with my words here.

 

Newcastle will win the Premier League and likely the Champions League soon enough. Because officials can be bought. Quite possibly out of fear. Marginal calls will go the Saudi-owned club’s way, which in the end will give them a competitive edge. 

 

Bein Sports may have produced 'evidence' the ball was not out, but they are a Qatari concern and hardly going to rock the boat where Saudi Arabia is concerned. How Stockley Park could have made a decision that the ball was not out without the technology to determine this is another question. The PGMOL stated that there were no clear angles to prove the ball had gone out of play after Bobby Madley confirmed the ball had stayed in. Eh? Meaning there were clear angles that showed it had stayed in?

Of course, we cannot rule out plain anti-Arsenal bias, which is alluded to with regard to Andy Madley in this Untold Arsenal offering.
 

I’ll leave it there, but rest assured, this will happen again, a different scenario but the same outcome – Newcastle get the big marginal decisions.

 

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