Claudius The easiest explanations are incompetence and bias.
It's not like the possibilities of incompetence, bias and corruption in poor decision-making exclude each other. In fact, these things go together.
The issue for the relatively long-lived cabal of PGMOL old boys is existential.
Webb is PGMOL's technical director and one of its media faces. He's been involved in Premier League refereeing for over two decades now. In the background you have other self-interested operators like Gallagher or Clattenburg looking for various angles to make a living. Both men who were active match referees in periods overlapping with Webb—note I'm not saying they're in a conspiracy with Webb, I'm just pointing out there is an echelon of men who have become "medium rich" from Premier League refereeing and want to continue earning.
This "golden generation" of referees is more or less a legacy of the Premier League's own inception date and the gradual way it worked out its institutions as they now stand. It's because this generation of referees has been part of the football furniture for ages that punters tolerate their media work.
There is no particular reason PGMOL's current structure and way of working is the best we could have. The system and its processes have been cobbled together. The league's VAR system is fractured and contributes controversy nearly every match week. No one other than the PGMOL old boys' club would be too bothered if this was all swept away in a campaign of reform and improvement.
This is why questions of competence have stirred up slightly absurd media stonewalling from PGMOL in many, many cases now. There have been many obviously dubious or inconsistent decisions that PGMOL has backed up with dodgy public rhetoric. For example rather than rationalising decisions, the KMI public reviews have often tended to make them seem even sillier and dodgier.
The reason is that PGMOL's incompetence threatens PGMOL's existence so they overcompensate. PGMOL is vulnerable, and in my assessment, it is likely to be—at least informally—corrupt.
