PGMOL: Everything you need to know about the referee group

“People don’t expect a striker to score every time they shoot,” Premier League referee Darren England argues, “but for us every decision needs to be correct.”

Few professions face the same scrutiny as Premier League referees, with fans, players and managers taking aim at the officials with the whistles at every opportunity. Yet, rather than social media trolls, the English game’s law enforcers have to answer to the shadowy governing body known solely through the acronym PGMOL.

Here’s everything you need to know about an organisation that is at the heart of every controversy each weekend.

Football players in England were formally and legally professionalised in 1885. Referees had to wait until 2001.

Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, the Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) was formed with the stated desire “to improve refereeing standards”.

A focus on fitness was key in a game which has only increased in pace over the subsequent two decades. Howard Webb, the only former PGMOL member to referee a men’s World Cup final, takes great pride in recounting an encounter with Gareth Southgate while “walking around in my base layer”. “Bloody hell,” Webb recalls Southgate yelling, “are you in good shape or what?” It’s a long way from the image of “small, dumpy, middle-aged men” that referee Andre Marriner painted when describing the previous wave of officials.

PGMOL’s match officials are split into three levels in the men’s game; Select Group 1 (primarily in charge of Premier League games), Select Group 2 (who mainly focus on the Championship) and the National Group (divided between Leagues One and Two).

There is only one tier of officials for the Women’s Super League (WSL); the women’s Select Group.

A total of 600 match officials comprise what is billed as a “highly skilled workforce”.

Beyond actually supplying the individuals in black or neon, PGMOL offers “the best possible wrap-around support available to aid officials’ performance for the benefit of the game”. The mental health aspect of this support has been imperative in the wake of the growing scale of abuse directed at referees after each Premier League match.

As he revealed in his unimaginatively titled autobiography, The Man in the Middle, Howard Webb once advised Jeremy Hunt – Britain’s current Chancellor of the Exchequer – on officiating when he “decided to train as a referee”. Since August 2022, his pearls of wisdom have been dished out among the nation’s referees rather than the House of Commons.

Webb was part of a significant shakeup of PGMOL’s leadership team in 2022. Soon after Webb arrived, Danielle Every left the highly successful British Cycling programme to become PGMOL’s chief operating officer. Steve McNally and Wayne Allison also joined as the governing body embarked upon its ‘Elite Referee Development Plan’ (ERDP).

One of the key objectives of the ERDP is the diversification of the PGMOL. In the summer of 2023, Sky Sports revealed that the Football Association was targeting the recruitment of 1,000 new referees from diverse ethnic backgrounds by 2026. Uriah Rennie is the only Black or Asian official to take charge of a top-flight game since the Premier League’s inception three decades ago.

PGMOL’s Leadership Team

Information via EFL

At the start of every season, each official – be that on-pitch referees, assistants or video-assisted adjudicators – has to declare their club allegiances. However many supporters may cry conspiracy, no Manchester United fans are in charge of the Red Devils, or any of their favourite team’s closest rivals.

PGMOL ensures that no official takes charge of one club too frequently while also taking into account the allegiances of their family members and even how close the stadium is to their home.

When it gets to the business end of the season, the process is complicated further by the implication of one result on other matches involving each referee’s club of choice.

The best referees are saved for the most high-profile matches. “Just like Liverpool will always play [Virgil] van Dijk in a big game, we’ll appoint our big hitters,” PGMOL’s Martin Atkinson, a former top-flight official, told The Guardian.

The longest-serving member of the current group of Select Group 1 officials is one of the most controversial; Anthony Taylor. A constant target of ire from many club fanbases – chief among them Chelsea – Taylor was seemingly demoted to the Championship at the start of the 2023/24 season after a controversial 2-2 draw between Newcastle United and Wolverhampton Wanderers only to be reinstated one week later.

Michael Oliver is widely upheld as the best official PGMOL has to offer, taking charge of his first top-flight match in 2010 when he was only 25. As many as 13 of the 22 players to start that game were older than Oliver.

Still only 38, the Northumberland native is a regular in matches between members of the traditional elite, contests which are heralded as “golden games” by PGMOL’s employees. By November of the 2023/24 season, Oliver had already overseen Tottenham Hotspur’s clashes with Chelsea and Manchester United as well as Manchester City’s trip to Arsenal. Yet even he can’t escape the stinging criticism that washes over the PGMOL each weekend.

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