Honest question: I’m a longtime premier league fan from the US. In my over 10 years of watching English football, I’ve never seen a person of color as the center referee in a premier league match. Does anyone know why this is? A significant percentage (majority) of premier league players are not white, and given research around subconscious bias, you have to imagine the league and refereeing body would have an interest in having their game officials be representative of the players they officiate? With the quality of officiating being in the news so much recently, increasing diversity in the ranks of game officials could be one idea. I imagine it’s just a big old boys club though…
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People are saying because abuse that refs get but I don’t know how true that is, it’s a lot simpler than that. There are hardly any referees, hardly anybody wants to become one and not many are needed. The pool of referees is an incredibly small number. Nearly every person in the UK is white, outside of London and Birmingham, there really aren’t many ethnic minorities in the country. I don’t know how many referees there are in the UK but if you take 100 random people in the UK they are very likely to all be white. Logically 99% of referees will be white and not that crazy for 100%.
Cause it’s the ol’ boys club
I’d like to see the stats on fouls called and cards by race, I think they’d start noticing their refs are all white.
This is the question you are not allowed to ask my friend
*shouldn’t be. Fk racism but stop bringing race to everything.
Haha, jesus
Always had the same question about fans in attendance! London is 54% white but I swear the stands are at least 90% white, probably more, even for London based clubs.
Is there not a lot of interest in soccer from other ethnicities in London, even though it’s such a worldwide sport? What’s the answer here?
English football was primarily created for the white working classes of the uk, a large portion that still attend games.
Also large numbers white people moved slightly outside of London and commute in to games.
I’d like to say that the qualifications they look for in a premier League ref is competency and how well they handle the pressure, but that wouldn’t make sense. I think the real question is “why are all the PL refs fucking dumb?”
I was wondering about this the other day when i saw a clip of an old game where Uriah Rennie was the main official. He was the only black referee I ever remember in the premier league tbh.
Dude… You just broke my brain. This is true. Been watching EPL for 22 years… What the fuck.
82% of people living in the UK are natives! So that’s a relative small pool of talent that’s available for diversity hiring? Not that hiring people purely based on skin colour is a good thing. Meritocracy & all that stuff?
You didn’t need to say you were from America that was fairly obvious. But just for reference, 82% of the UK are white. That figure alone probably has something to do with it. And as for Europe as a whole, something like 90% of people are white. So we can drop this race shit. Very few people want to be referees. They’d much rather prefer to be players of the game.
Someone is gonna get a call from the PGMOL. You’re not allowed to ask that question.
its england so makes sense most are white
There’s been articles on this in recent years. It seems black referees in particular move up the refereeing ranks and then once it starts getting to serious professional levels the FA or a referees body (I’m not sure which) just doesn’t put them through to the next level so they can’t move up the leagues anymore which surely has to be questioned by the football governing bodies.
There was a black premier league referee many years ago called Uriah Rennie and he was very good. It’s a shame he’s been the only one.
Excellent question