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?
I think yes. Not necessarily because they are better, but just because we have this cliquey self-serving situation where they recruit from an extremely narrow band of British society and watch out for their own way too much. If you break that up, increase the training standards and pay, recruit from a wider pool, I think you see standards improve.
I think introducing more rigor in the recruitment, making it a proper degree level qualification where you also study things like coaching and sports science, sports psychology etc. Opening the recruitment up to all parts of British society and yes foreign refs as well.