SFA Continues To Shield The Most Protected Officials In Europe

A lot of what’s wrong with Scottish football can be traced right to the doors of the SFA.

This is an organisation that accepts no personal responsibility, and who’s officials get more protection from scrutiny than just about any others in Europe.

For years beyond count now, people have been calling for openness and transparency from these people, and we’re not one step closer to getting it.

Indeed, in a lot of ways we’ve gone backwards.

The last time we had a serious chance at reforming the way refereeing works in Scotland their community, still reeling from the suspension of Hugh Dallas for sending sectarian emails, spat the dummies out of the pram and went on strike.

The media, of course, found a way to blame Celtic for that.

As a consequence, these guys bought themselves virtual immunity from criticism.

The media largely goes along with that.

Managers can’t comment on them without sanction.

Clubs can’t ask hard questions without hysterical commentary accusing them of bitterness or worse.

What’s the result?

Predictably, it’s this; we have utterly useless referees in this country if they’re not biased.

We don’t dare push on that possibility, of course, because as some in the media have already stated, openly, we don’t want to know that for sure.

Over on Fields I wrote an article earlier this year called Around A Crooked Table, where I stated my wholehearted belief that at least one match in which I’ve had an emotional stake has been partly, or even wholly, rigged.

I’ve still got no reason to doubt that, and indeed much I’ve seen since I wrote that piece in May has only increased that belief.

Match-fixing would be astonishingly easy in Scotland.

That’s a hard truth few want to face, but I’ve looked into it in other countries and it’s astonishingly easy there.

We are mugs if we believe it’s never happened here.

Even England has had to face up to the reality of it; a high profile case inspired the writing of the article and ended in convictions for a number of ex-players.

One of them, Sam Sodje, who had played for Reading and Portsmouth, once punched Notts Forest player Jose Baxter twice in a match to get himself sent off, earning himself £70,000 from a betting syndicate which had put its cold cash on a red card in the game.

Nowadays you can bet on everything, from how many bookings to how many corner kicks there are in a match, and every level of the game is wide open.

I use an online betting company that offers wagers on games involving Under 18 teams and amateur sides in leagues so obscure it boggles the mind to think there’s someone at each match keeping the company up to date with the goings on.

Given the volume of bets those sites take every single day, it’s impossible to police these things adequately.

I’m sure that there are matches on which I’ve placed bets which have been rigged; there’s simply no way to know which ones.

Match-fixing involving officials has happened in almost every other country in Europe.

We’ve found no evidence of it in England, where the focus has been on players involved in scams, but the governing bodies would be naïve beyond belief to think that it’s not gone on.

It may still be.

Here in Scotland we have seen decisions that spark honest to God disbelief.

Few query the possible motivations behind them.

This is partly because our sports and media culture is peculiar in a way, because so many people are ready to put those bad decisions, or the complaining about them, down to local biases, but what if we’re way off?

What if that’s a smokescreen, behind which serious, financially motivated, cheating is going on?

Perversely, in allowing officials like Alan Muir to make glaring, unpardonable mistakes – and he’s refereeing the Hearts v Motherwell game this coming weekend after those decisions – without any explanation or sanction to him, we’re creating precisely the circumstances under which match-rigging or other such behaviours can grow.

That man should not referee a major game in Scotland again, period.

I’m not so much interested in how he might affect our team as in how he might have influenced games which don’t even blip on our radar, being focussed only on Celtic.

In recent years we’ve taken to calling inexplicable decisions against our club “honest mistakes”, with the heavy emphasis on the irony.

But I’ll tell you something, I worry that more and more of these calls are more dishonest than we imagine.

There is no push for these matters to be fully investigated.

Indeed, our media balks at the very suggestion that we’re not watching an honest game, but day by day the suspicion grows in the hearts of the supporters who pay their money, that something reeks.

Instead of doing something to assuage these concerns, the SFA allows referees to draw the veil of secrecy ever tighter.

Questions aren’t encouraged, even by those within the game itself, and criticism from that quarter is punished harshly.

Our officials are the most protected in Europe.

As such, the recipe for disaster is cooking away nicely.