Really good article about referees in England https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/ridiculous-refereeing-obsession-why-hell-would-you-bother
Never really understood this comparison. Missing an open goal isn't against the LOTG, but a catastrophic officiating error is. Nonetheless, good article.
Really? Its not about the fact that its against the LOTG, its the unfair comparison that humans make mistakes, yet a player is more likely to be forgiven for that mistake than a referee is for their one.
Premier League referees make 245 decisions per game on average, or one every 22 seconds. Sky Sports calculated in March 2018 that, again on average, five of those decisions were incorrect. Any player on the pitch is likely to make more: misplaced passes, failed dribble, missed chances, fouls committed, poor position or marking, the wrong decision taken.
Think how much a referee has to do and watch and its pretty impressive how few mistakes they do make but they make that one mistake and especially with VAR these days, and it gets viewed over and over again in super slow motion. That is really what the comparison is about, they get lambasted for their mistake more than a player would ever get.
As you say, decisions get analysed so much these days - so I wonder how different things would be if there weren't pre and post match shows, or whether the pundits on these shows didn't talk about refereeing mistakes. Same thing with post match interviews - managers like complaining that they should have had a penalty, or the opposition should have had a man sent off. Again, if these interviews didn't happen there probably won't be such a focus on incorrect decisions, and the general perception of the decisions won't be (often incorrectly) influenced by these pundits and managers.