Honest question: I’m a longtime premier league fan from the US. In my over 10 years of watching English football, I’ve never seen a person of color as the center referee in a premier league match. Does anyone know why this is? A significant percentage (majority) of premier league players are not white, and given research around subconscious bias, you have to imagine the league and refereeing body would have an interest in having their game officials be representative of the players they officiate? With the quality of officiating being in the news so much recently, increasing diversity in the ranks of game officials could be one idea. I imagine it’s just a big old boys club though…
People are saying because abuse that refs get but I don’t know how true that is, it’s a lot simpler than that. There are hardly any referees, hardly anybody wants to become one and not many are needed. The pool of referees is an incredibly small number. Nearly every person in the UK is white, outside of London and Birmingham, there really aren’t many ethnic minorities in the country. I don’t know how many referees there are in the UK but if you take 100 random people in the UK they are very likely to all be white. Logically 99% of referees will be white and not that crazy for 100%.