Coombs Feels like some of y'all think corruption has to be people in hoods in a secret chamber cackling evil laughs. It's blatantly corrupt. It may be casual, it may be banal, it may be informal, but it's corrupt.

Yes, this is it. Corruption looks a lot like the boys private WhatsApp chat organising fortnightly beers and happening to clarify its collective workplace agenda at the same time.

PGMOL smells like a typical example of an insufficiently professionalised and remunerated bureaucracy that has been fractured by conflicts of interest. Almost all public bureaucracies were like this in the UK prior to the great round of reforms in the 19C.

The Premier League has institutions so weak that it is on the point of being crippled by business and legal attacks launched by several of its own member clubs. Every time there's a super league challenge PGMOL refs have to wonder if they'll still have their jobs in the new world, so it's no surprise PGMOL has its grifters taking Saudi paydays or trying to create lateral career paths for themselves.

All of the above but corruption is definitely a part of it. Some of them are on Man City’s payroll, no doubt indirectly, others are perhaps hoping to be. The reality is that we have received 3 red cards this season for infringements that have been repeated by others dozens of times, in this very same season, and not been punished in the same way. On the other hand, blatant penalties and red cards in our favour are not given. VAR doesn’t even check them. Whenever there is a possibility to rule out an Arsenal goal, it’s taken. I refuse to believe that they can be that incompetent. The evidence for corruption is overwhelming.

The club should actively work towards destroying PGMOL completely. Fuck them all off and bring in foreign referees. We have nothing to lose at this point. It’s worse than the Fergie era. There’s no point to this entire competition since it happens every single week, every single game.

Having the same incompetent referees in the VAR booth doubles the problem rather than fixing it. If you had truly independent people there, not other refs who feel sympathy for their mates, you could get somewhere. Is it me or every time I watch an Italian or Spanish match, which is admittedly not as often but I do, you don't see as many blatant mistakes and VAR seems to sort of work better and faster. Right? Or is it just in my head?

Gurgen I really hope the club is just taking its time to compile the biggest dossier ever compiled and that will be the beginning of the end of this PGMOL shit show.

We can't simply do nothing about it out of fear.

Agree. Call me a whiny little bitch or whatever, but it is impossible to win the league in these circumstances. It's just impossible. We are only 9 games in and they have already stolen 7-9 points from us. We have to do something, whatever it takes.

FEBravo __ It's not in your head - VAR has vastly reduced referee errors everywhere but in England.

Bring Back Kerrea Gilbert The problem is that we can put forward all the evidence we want but the rest of the world will just laugh at us and call us crazy conspiracy theorists and what not so nothing will happen except we will only get an even larger target on our backs. Just read The Guardian's two articles about the game and one of them focuses on our 'dark arts' for having injured players on the grass and Ronay's piece has a paragraph that makes fun of Arsenal fans' feeling of injustice. He totally dismisses that Martinelli should have had a pen and none of them brings up the ghost freekick that ruled out our winning goal.

I cannot recall having heard a single British pundit backing us even a little bit in any of the instances where we were robbed so the narrative is completely against us.

Webb and PGMOl have zero accountability

Taylor needs the budapest airport treatment, public needs to harass these cunts because the referees are a boys club, one defending the other

Are there zero Arsenal fan journalists, writers etc anywhere?

Burnwinter there's a failure to recognise that the skills need to be a good on field referee aren't the same skills needed in the VAR booth.

But how can one "forget" to draw lines? How can one look at someone smashing his forearm into a player's head and say "he didn't use it as a weapon"? How can one say "he has his hands on his back but there is no push". It defies belief and I don't buy it.

I agree, it's not solely incompetence. The yellow cards given to Rice and Trossard earlier in the season in decisions that haven't been repeated weren't incompetent, they were pointed and deliberate.

The smoking gun that would destroy PGMOL would be if it ever came out they'd ever experimented with controversial decisions to "drive engagement" ... I consider it a bit less likely than basic bitch vendettas and meddling, but not impossible.

Gurgen because they are out to get Arsenal. When it comes to us, there is no incompetence. They know exactly what they are doing.

Yeah, I have to say I remain dubious about the concept of institutional bias against the Arsenal from the the PGMOL, but I've just finished watching the BBC's Linford documentary and it was a pretty stark reminder that such biases do exist and are propagated in the media.

Mirth That's one way to look at it, but since VAR has also affected the way match refs adjudicate, the problem goes all the way down.

Still think the "video assist" for decisions requiring discretion and interpretation should just be the match ref enabled with video on the side of the pitch or with a tablet. The league can implement machine systems for offside and goal line decisions—just robot linesmen, then, so no issue and it fits with tradition.

Get a bit of accountability back into things as the "clear and obvious error" nonsense creates way too many wicked incentives for the shambles at PGMOL to handle, they're way too busy covering each other's arses to do the right thing, by and large.

RocktheCasbah Arguing any bias is specifically "anti-Arsenal" isn't really necessary from my point of view, it's setting the bar for criticism of PGMOL too high. This is an organisation that should be able to prove for its own sake that it delivers high standards of probity and impartiality.