We attract the best players and managers from around the world but don’t do the same for refs. Then we wonder why the officiating is much worse than the quality of players and coaches. The quality of the playing would be way worse without foreigners and quality of refereeing would improve with foreigners.
Agree or disagree?
So, I am Dutch and I would say this is absolutely not necessary. I live in a country of 18 million and we field better referees than you. Why? I have no clue. It’s certainly not like they’re paid better.
What I’m getting at, is that England should have the capacity to fix this themselves. Any of the proposed solutions, from getting rid of VAR to importing referees, is kind of an embarrassment to a league as big as the Premier League. There are SO many things that can still be tried before just giving up on your own referees.
For starters, you could pay these guys enough for it to be an attractive fulltime job. They could train weekly, the way players do. There could be more uniformity in the application of rules, like that’s just a matter of agreeing together on how we’re going to officiate the game. VAR could definitely be finetuned, because the way it’s used now doesn’t always make sense.
I honestly don’t even feel like any attempts have been made to fix what’s broken. So let’s try that first before importing referees.
All fair comments. Though when a culture needs fixing, importing new people and their ideas can be a helpful start.