This season, referees’ personal pledges will be made transparent as part of fresh rules aimed at maintaining the ethics of football. This comes after Nottingham Forest was indicted by the Football Association in May after they said the referee wrongly neglected three clear penalty requests during their match against Everton. Stuart Attwell is a supporter of Luton. After Forest maintained that it should consider “contextual rivalries” when arranging matches, PGMOL’s chief referee, Howard Webb, replied that there were no plans to change the rules. Authorities currently have to publicly declare their loyalty in order to prevent any disputes.
Webb nevertheless share plans to make the allegiances list publicly available. According to Webb, “Officials are asked to declare any specific interests beforehand of the season, and as those things change as the tournament goes on. He also revealed that PGMOL will, in a ground-breaking step, make public the declared allegiances of all Premier League referees this season.
