This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name's William Ralston and I'm the journalist who wrote The Impossible

Job Inside the World of Premier League Referees, which was published in April 2023.

The article is a look at who referees are and what they do.

The story for anyone who follows football is kind of a low

hanging fruit. I think everyone who worked in long-form journalism recognized that there was a story

there because at the time of writing it, there was an extraordinary amount of noise and criticism

around referees. People were saying that VAR were making them worse. PJMOL, the body that

manages them, were denying that and it was a friction.

And I suppose I wanted to understand what was really happening.

Why, despite better technology, does there seem to be more mistakes than we've ever seen before?

For anyone who knows football, the organisations that manage referees have historically been

extremely private when it comes to their referees or being

extremely protective sorry so when referees are given interviews if they've been allowed to give in interviews

they've been very stage managed and controlled thankfully i managed to persuade the pgmo who was starting a

new era let's say under a new head, Howard Webb,

kindly agreed to let me in and let me shadow two referees across the season.

And it was a tremendous pleasure and an amazing and extremely enlightening.

So I'm very thankful for them for allowing me in, I suppose.

After the story was published in April, 2023,

I would say referee entered a crisis point,

...