Richard Scudamore And The Premier League Attempt To Reignite ‘Respect’ Campaign

In an attempt to help out the Premier League with their Respect campaign, I’ve collated a series of ideas which could form a platform for a real change in the way players and managers interact with referees. Some of the ‘rules’ outlined may seem draconian (and probably are draconian. Oh well), but considering the frankly awful culture that surrounds referees it seems impossible for them to do their jobs anything like effectively. However, the referees themselves must do more to be seen as reasonable, unbiased and unbiasable arbiters. The ‘Respect’ campaign, then should really be two-fold:

Ready? Here goes!

Despite being announced on April Fool’s Day, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore seemed deadly serious when he announce that it was time to kick the ‘Respect’ campaign into higher gear. For those unfamiliar with the initiative, ‘Respect’ is the Premier League’s attempt to tone down some of the vitriolic behaviour towards referees by players and managers, and should probably be so far considered something a little short of a breathtaking success.

All that’s very well and good, but without actually defining the goals of the campaign and the path to take to achieve said goals, this does all sound like rather nebulous waffle. Instead of defining behaviour that’s unacceptable and enforcing byzantine rules inconstantly and fairly ineffectually, how about the Premier League law down some hard and fast regulations about behaviour towards referees while at the same time forcing the refereeing to move towards a higher standard? Does that really seem so hard?