The standard of refereeing could definitely be much higher. I alluded to it previously with the comments about "innocent fraud".
The attributes that used to serve referees well were fitness, authority, emotional resilience and only then an intricate knowledge of the laws of football and how to apply them.
We've had a few incidents in recent seasons where the match ref or the VAR demonstrably did not know or correctly apply the law.
This is why I think that intervention in referee development to better meet the needs of professional football that's being played under 360° of scrutiny is the obvious answer to this problem.
The fact is PGMOL's established cohort of referees aren't all the right people with the right skills for the job as they should be doing it today.
The way in which PGMOL has inserted itself in the discourse to ambiguously defend its bad decisions is making matters worse. We are constantly having "letter of the law" debates in which it's clear the only "letter" is that of unaccountable discretion by these referees, and the issues with accountability are made worse by the current design of the VAR system.
You'd hope the league can see this is the case, but unfortunately, there's not much immediate material incentive to fix the issues with refereeing, because the constant contention over bad decisions generates very substantial additional profit for the broadcast rights holders and the whole adjacent ecosystem of bullshit artists.
