How Premier League Referees Are Appointed and Assessed

Stockley Park sits under the Heathrow approach in west London, in an office block indistinguishable from the twenty around it. On a Saturday afternoon in season, a room inside that building carries a live feed from every Premier League ground in England at once. The officials sitting in front of those screens learned which match was theirs several days earlier, from a small company that most supporters could not name and that no club has any influence over whatsoever. The referee standing on the grass at Turf Moor or the London Stadium found out at the same moment, in the same email.

Appointments are the least visible part of English refereeing and the part that shapes almost everything else about it. Who gets the big fixture, who gets the video chair, who quietly disappears from the Saturday list for a fortnight — those decisions are made inside Professional Game Match Officials Limited, and the reasoning behind them is rarely published. What follows is the structure: how PGMOL is put together, how it fits alongside the FA and the leagues, and the machinery of observation, marking and promotion that decides who ends up in the middle at the biggest grounds in the country.

What PGMOL actually is, and who owns it

Professional Game Match Officials Limited was established in 2001. Before that, English referees were part-timers. They had jobs — teachers, police officers, printers, a butcher or two — and they were appointed to Football League and Premier League matches by the competitions themselves, from a National List maintained by the Football Association. The step taken in 2001 was to take a small group of them out of employment altogether and pay them to referee full-time, with a dedicated organisation to manage them. Philip Don, a former Premier League referee, ran that first professional group.

PGMOL is a limited company, funded jointly by the Premier League, the English Football League and the FA. That three-way arrangement is the reason it exists as a separate entity rather than as a department of any one of them. It also has a consequence supporters routinely get wrong: the Premier League does not appoint referees, and cannot instruct PGMOL to drop one.

• 2001PGMOL established
• 6Match officials appointed per Premier League fixture
• 14Minimum age to begin the FA referee course
• 3Governing bodies funding PGMOL

Fixed structural facts about the English professional game, not figures from any single season.

The division of labour between PGMOL and the FA is worth getting straight, because complaints about refereeing in England are constantly addressed to the wrong body. The FA registers every referee in the country, from a fifteen-year-old taking their first under-11 match on a Sunday morning to the official in charge of a title decider. The FA also owns the disciplinary system: charges, suspensions, appeals and written reasons all sit with it, which is why a red card issued on a Saturday is dealt with under FA regulations rather than Premier League ones. You can follow that thread further in our guide to Premier League suspension rules.

PGMOL's remit is narrower and deeper. It selects, trains, tests, appoints and assesses the officials working the professional game. It employs the full-time ones. It runs their pre-season, sets their fitness protocols, and decides each week who takes which match.

Since 2001 the organisation has been led by a small number of people, each of them a former referee: Philip Don from the start, then Keith Hackett, then Mike Riley through a long period that took in the arrival of goal-line technology and video assistance, and then Howard Webb as Chief Refereeing Officer. Webb's tenure brought a shift in posture — the Match Officials Mic'd Up programme, which plays the audio from contentious decisions and explains what the officials were weighing, would have been unthinkable under the older culture of saying nothing at all.

Select Group, Select Group 2 and the National List

The professional referees who take Premier League matches are known as Select Group 1. A second tier, Select Group 2, was created later and covers EFL football, principally the Championship, while also supplying video officials. Beneath both sits the National List, the FA's register of referees qualified for senior professional and National League football, most of whom are not full-time and hold other jobs.

Names and boundaries here have moved around more than once, and PGMOL does not publish a fixed establishment number for either Select Group. The size of each group changes with retirements, injuries and promotions from below. Anyone quoting an exact headcount is quoting a number that was true on some particular day.

Tier	Typical competitions	Employment
Select Group 1	Premier League, senior FA Cup rounds, VAR duty	Full-time professional
Select Group 2	EFL Championship and below, VAR duty	Professional or semi-professional
National List (Level 1)	EFL, National League, FA Cup	Part-time, appointed per match
Level 2 and below	Contributory and supply leagues, county football	Part-time, appointed per match

Assistant referees run their own parallel lists with their own promotion routes, and the two careers are largely separate. A very good assistant is not an apprentice referee. The skills overlap far less than the shared uniform suggests, and it is entirely normal for an official to spend twenty years on the line at the top level having never wanted the middle.

Progress into Select Group 1 comes from Select Group 2 or from the National List, on the strength of assessments accumulated over full seasons rather than on any single performance. There is no examination to pass and no fixed term of service. It is a judgement made by PGMOL's leadership on a body of evidence, which is both the honest description and the one that frustrates people most.

Inside the appointment week

Appointments are made centrally, a round at a time, and confirmed to officials and clubs several days before the fixtures. Broadcast selections influence the timing — a match moved to a Monday night creates a different set of availability problems from one kicking off at three o'clock on a Saturday — so the shape of the round is already known when the names are attached. If you want to understand why a fixture is where it is in the first place, the calendar mechanics are covered in how Premier League fixtures are made.

Half a dozen constraints operate at once. A referee who worked a Wednesday night in the north cannot reasonably take a Saturday lunchtime kick-off at the other end of the country. An official on UEFA duty in midweek is unavailable at the weekend. Someone recovering from a hamstring strain picked up in a warm-up is out for a fortnight. Two officials share a car and a postcode, which is a scheduling detail rather than a rule but it exists. Someone has done that particular club twice already inside a month.

1. 1Round confirmedKick-off times and broadcast picks are settled, so the shape of the weekend is fixed before officials are attached.
2. 2Availability collectedInjuries, UEFA and FIFA call-ups, midweek workload and travel are logged for every official.
3. 3Conflicts screenedDeclared club allegiances and recent appointments to the same clubs are checked and ruled out.
4. 4Provisional list builtReferee, two assistants, fourth official, VAR and assistant VAR are allocated to each fixture.
5. 5Appointments issuedOfficials and clubs are notified, and the appointments are published for supporters and media.
6. 6Match preparationThe team of officials reviews the fixture, its history and the clubs' patterns before travelling.
7. 7Late substitutionIllness or a warm-up injury promotes the fourth official, and the appointment is reissued on the day.

The sequence of an appointment round. It describes the process, not the reasoning behind any individual selection.

The fourth official is a real appointment rather than a reserve. That official manages the technical areas, handles substitutions, checks equipment and holds up the board, and in England they are drawn from the same professional group as the referee. When something goes wrong in the tunnel or on the touchline, the fourth official's report is part of the paperwork that follows.

Late changes happen more often than most supporters realise. A referee pulling up in the warm-up promotes the fourth official into the middle, one of the assistants becomes the fourth, and a replacement assistant is found from whoever is available and close enough. It is untidy. It also has to be resolved inside about forty minutes.

The conflict of interest checks

Every official on the professional list declares which club they support. That declaration is a hard bar — a referee never takes a match involving the club they have registered as their own, in any competition, at any point in their career. This is not a matter of judgement and there is no discretion in it.

Geography is messier. The long-standing practice in English football was that a referee did not take matches involving clubs from their home county, and at the amateur end of the game that convention still operates through the County FAs. At the top of the professional pyramid it collapses under arithmetic. English clubs are not distributed evenly across the country; there is an enormous concentration in Greater London and another in the North West, and a small professional group cannot supply a Merseyside derby with an official who has no geographical connection to anywhere within an hour of it. PGMOL therefore uses declared allegiance as an absolute rule and proximity as a factor weighed alongside others.

The other categories are more conventional. Family relationships with players, staff or directors are declared. Commercial interests are declared. Betting on football is prohibited outright — the FA operates a blanket ban that covers match officials in exactly the same way it covers players, and it is not limited to matches the official is involved in, or even to English football. Referees have been charged and suspended under that rule.

Then there is the media question, which England answers differently from most of Europe. English match officials do not give post-match interviews. They do not explain decisions from a pitchside microphone at full time and they do not appear at press conferences. The referee's account of a sending-off goes into a written report to the FA and, in disputed cases, into the papers before a Regulatory Commission. Everything the public hears about the decision comes through PGMOL afterwards, in aggregate, or through the Mic'd Up format, and that gap between the noise at the ground and the explanation weeks later is the single biggest source of frustration with the system.

Observers, delegates and the marks that follow a referee home

Somebody is watching the referee at every professional match in England, and writing it down.

PGMOL appoints a match observer — the older term, still widely used, is assessor — whose job is the officials and nothing else. The observer files a structured report covering positioning, application of the Laws, control, consistency, cooperation between the team of officials, and handling of the specific incidents the match threw up. It is a technical document written by someone who has usually refereed at a high level themselves.

Separately, the competition appoints a match delegate with a much broader remit: kick-off punctuality, pitch condition, behaviour in the technical areas, crowd issues, whether the teamsheet arrived on time. The delegate reports on the officials as part of that, from a different vantage point and with a different set of concerns.

Clubs contribute too. In the English system below the Premier League, both clubs submit a mark for the referee after each match, and those marks feed into the same file as the observer's report. It is an unusual arrangement — the participants grade the adjudicator — and it has obvious problems, which is why the marks are one input rather than the decision.

How those inputs are weighted is not published. PGMOL has never released the formula that turns observer reports, delegate reports and club marks into a ranking, and the honest position is that outsiders do not know it. What is clear is that a merit order exists, that it determines who gets the highest-profile fixtures, and that it moves during a season rather than being set at the start of one.

Alongside all of this the Premier League runs an independent Key Match Incidents panel. It reviews contentious decisions from each round — penalties given and not given, red cards, offside calls that turned a match — with a panel that includes former players and coaches as well as league and PGMOL representatives, working to a majority. The panel does not discipline anyone. It produces data, and the accuracy figures published from it are the only systematic public measure of English refereeing performance that exists.

There is a tension in the system that nobody has solved. A referee can be marked highly by an observer for a technically sound afternoon and still be removed from the following week's list because of one decision that dominated the news. Both things are defensible. They are not consistent with each other.

Promotion, demotion and being stood down

Movement between the groups runs in both directions, and it is not rare. Referees are promoted from Select Group 2 into Select Group 1 on the strength of a full season's assessments; referees are moved back down when the file no longer supports keeping them at the top. Nobody holds a Premier League place by seniority.

The lighter measure, and the one that generates most of the speculation, is being stood down. An official who makes a high-profile error may simply not appear on the next round's appointments, or may be given a Championship fixture instead of a Premier League one. PGMOL has at times confirmed this openly and at other times said nothing. The absence of an announcement is not evidence that nothing has happened.

Below the professional game the process is entirely different and much more transparent, because it is run by County FAs to published criteria. Promotion between the lower levels is an annual scheme with clear requirements.

1. 1QualifyComplete the FA referee course from age 14, register with a County FA, and start at Level 7 in local football.
2. 2Level 7 to 6Referee a minimum number of games in the season, collect satisfactory club marks and pass an observer assessment.
3. 3Level 6 to 5Take on senior county league football, with more observations and a higher standard expected on control.
4. 4Level 5 to 4Move into supply league football and add a fitness test to the promotion requirements.
5. 5Level 4 to 3Contributory league appointments, regular observation, and assessment against national criteria.
6. 6Level 3 to 2Panel league football and consideration for the national assistant referee lists.
7. 7Level 2 to 1Selection to the National List for EFL and National League matches, the entry point to the professional game.
8. 8Into the groupsPromotion to Select Group 2 and then Select Group 1 on PGMOL's assessment of a full body of work.

The structure of the FA and County FA promotion pathway. Level naming has been revised over the years and exact requirements are set annually by each County FA.

Most referees never go beyond Level 5, and the majority of those who qualify each year stop refereeing entirely within a couple of seasons. The attrition is real and the reasons for it are not a mystery: abuse from touchlines at grassroots level in England is bad enough that the FA has trialled body cameras for referees in local football. Our guide to how to become a referee in England goes through the entry route in detail, and the County FA system explains who actually administers it.

Fitness testing and the physical standard

Referees at the professional level in England sit the FIFA fitness test protocol, adopted by the FA for its own lists. It comes in two parts: a set of repeated maximal sprints over a short distance, each of which must be completed inside a set time with a fixed recovery between them, and a high-intensity interval test on a running track in which the official alternates fast running over a measured distance with a short walking recovery, repeated until the required number of cycles is complete.

The exact distances and times have been revised by FIFA more than once, and they differ between referees and assistant referees, and between categories of official. Assistant referees also sit a change-of-direction test, which reflects the sideways sprinting the job involves rather than the straight-line running a referee does. Quoting a single set of numbers as the standard would be misleading, because there is no single set.

Testing takes place at the pre-season camp and again during the season. Failure is not automatically career-ending — an official can be retested — but a referee who cannot pass does not get appointed, and there is no discretion available.

The reason the standard is so specific is that the physical demands of a Premier League match are unusual. A referee covers ground in the same range as a central midfielder over ninety minutes, but with a different profile: constant repositioning, frequent changes of direction, and the requirement to arrive at an incident from the correct angle rather than merely nearby. The referee is also doing all of it while making decisions, and decision quality degrades with fatigue in officials exactly as it does in players.

FIFA dropped its long-standing upper age limit for the international referee list, and there is no fixed retirement age on the English domestic lists either. The physical test is the same for a 28-year-old and a 47-year-old. That is a fairer arrangement than an arbitrary birthday, and it does not entirely remove the question, because promotion decisions inevitably weigh how many seasons a referee has left.

Camps, video sessions and the summer law changes

Law changes take effect on 1 July each year, which is why the professional game's pre-season for officials is built around them. IFAB — the International Football Association Board — decides those changes at its annual general meeting in the spring, and England has an unusually direct voice in the process. IFAB has eight votes: four are held by FIFA and one each by the four British associations, the FA, the Scottish FA, the Football Association of Wales and the Irish Football Association. Six votes are needed to change a Law. Nothing in the Laws of the Game changes anywhere in the world without the agreement of at least two of the four British bodies, an arrangement dating from IFAB's foundation in 1886 that survives largely intact.

The summer camp puts the whole professional group in one place for physical testing, classroom work on the amended Laws, and video analysis. Clip sessions run through the season as well — incidents from the previous round, shown to the group, argued over, and used to set a common standard for the weeks ahead. Consistency between officials is manufactured in those rooms, not discovered on the pitch.

PGMOL officials also visit Premier League training grounds before the season, going through the law changes with squads and coaching staff directly. It is a sensible piece of diplomacy and a genuinely useful one: a change to what counts as a handball is much better absorbed by a defender in a meeting room in July than by the same defender in a penalty area in September.

Communication work has become a larger part of the programme than it once was. Managing a captain, defusing a confrontation, choosing when to speak and when to say nothing — these are coachable and they are coached, and the Mic'd Up recordings show how much of a modern referee's afternoon is conversation rather than adjudication.

How VAR duty is allocated

Video assistance arrived in the Premier League from the 2019/20 season, and England made a structural choice that most leagues did not: the video officials work from a single central hub at Stockley Park rather than from a truck at each ground. Every match is covered from the same building, by officials drawn from the same professional pool.

Two officials are appointed to the video role for each fixture — the VAR and the assistant VAR — and both come from the same lists that supply the on-field team. A referee will therefore spend some weekends in the middle and others in the chair, and the appointments are made together so that nobody is doing both in a way that would not work physically or in terms of conflicts. The conflict rules apply identically to video appointments; an official does not take VAR duty on a match involving the club they support.

Some officials are noticeably better at the video role than at refereeing, and the reverse is also true. They are different jobs. One demands presence, movement and management of twenty-two people; the other demands rapid analysis of replays under time pressure, in a room, with a colleague talking in your ear.

What the video official may intervene on is not PGMOL's decision. The protocol is set by IFAB and covers a defined set of situations — goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards and mistaken identity — with the threshold of a clear and obvious error, or a serious missed incident. That framework has been amended since its introduction and its application has changed noticeably in the Premier League even where the wording has not. How VAR works in the Premier League sets out the protocol and its limits, and the older, uncontroversial technology it sits alongside is covered in goal-line technology in English football.

Semi-automated offside technology was introduced to the Premier League during the 2024/25 season, taking the manual line-drawing out of the most time-consuming category of review. It changed the speed of the process rather than the principle.

Why the same referee does not keep getting the same club

Familiarity is the problem the appointments team is guarding against, and it works in both directions. A referee who has taken a club four times in two months has accumulated a history with that dressing room — a disallowed goal, a penalty not given, a manager sent to the stands — and every subsequent decision is read through it by everyone involved. Spreading appointments is partly about the perception of impartiality and partly about protecting the official from a grievance that compounds.

Arithmetic limits how far it can go. There are twenty clubs, 380 league matches, and a professional group small enough that every referee will take every club several times across a season regardless of how carefully the spread is managed. PGMOL has never published a hard cap on how often an official may be appointed to a particular club, and any specific figure circulating online should be treated as somebody's inference.

Two things complicate it further. English referees on the FIFA international list, nominated annually by the FA, are appointed by UEFA and FIFA to matches abroad, which removes them from domestic rounds at unpredictable intervals. And domestic cup competitions draw on the same pool, so a referee taking an FA Cup tie involving a Premier League club has effectively used up one of that club's appointments in a competition that does not appear on the league list at all.

From a Sunday morning park pitch to the middle at Wembley

The entry point is the FA's basic referee course, open from the age of 14, delivered as a mix of online modules and in-person practical sessions through the County FAs. Pass it, register, and you are a Level 7 referee taking local league football, paid a match fee by the clubs on the day.

After that it is annual. Each promotion year requires a minimum number of matches refereed, marks submitted by the clubs you have refereed, and reports from observers appointed by the County FA. Do enough, well enough, and you go up a level. The fitness test enters the requirements as you climb. Somewhere around Level 4 the football stops being local and starts involving long drives on Saturday mornings to grounds you have never heard of, which is where a large proportion of promising referees decide it is not worth it.

The step that changes everything is selection to the National List, which puts an official into EFL football. From there the professional groups are within reach. Time served varies enormously and there is no standard path, but a decade from first whistle to the Football League would be quick rather than typical, and the great majority of the roughly thirty thousand registered referees in England will never referee a professional match. The pyramid beneath is described in the English football pyramid and non-league steps.

Wembley is the FA's gift rather than PGMOL's. The referee for the FA Cup final is appointed by the Football Association, and the convention has long been that the honour is spread around the group rather than concentrated on whoever is currently rated highest. It is a convention, not a rule, and it has been applied inconsistently across the competition's history — in the earlier eras of the tournament some referees took more than one final.

PGMOL's responsibilities have widened in recent years to take in the top of the women's game in England, bringing the officials working the Women's Super League into the same professional structure of testing, observation and appointment. That was overdue, and it is the most significant structural change to English refereeing since the video officials arrived.

What match officials are paid, and what is not public

Select Group referees are employees. The pay structure combines an annual salary with a fee for each match officiated, plus fees for fourth official and video duty and reimbursement of travel, which means a referee's earnings vary with how many appointments they receive in a season. That variable element is a deliberate part of the design.

The actual figures are not published. PGMOL is a private limited company and files accounts, and those accounts show aggregate staff costs rather than individual salaries, so it is possible to know roughly what the organisation spends and impossible to know what any named official earns. Everything in circulation about Premier League referee salaries is journalism working from sources, presented with more confidence than the sourcing supports. If a number matters to you, treat the range you have read as an estimate rather than a fact.

Below the professional group the arrangement is completely different. National List and lower-level officials are paid a match fee set by the competition, appointment by appointment, with expenses, and almost all of them hold other employment. At grassroots level in England the referee is paid in the changing room before kick-off by the two clubs, at a rate the league sets, and the amount would surprise anyone who assumes refereeing is lucrative at any level below the very top.

Worth saying plainly: the money is not why people do it below the professional game, and the abuse rates mean it cannot be. The FA's recruitment problem is a retention problem.

Finding out who has been appointed before you travel

The Premier League publishes the full list of match officials for each round on its own website, and PGMOL publishes appointments as well. The EFL does the same for its competitions. The names are usually available in the days before the fixtures, which is early enough to be in the matchday programme and in the broadcasters' build-up graphics. The team of officials is also printed on the teamsheet handed out at the ground.

Whether the information is any use is another matter. Supporters circulate records of how a particular club has fared under a particular referee, and those records are almost always statistical noise: a handful of matches, no control for the opposition, no control for the quality of the performances, and a conclusion drawn from a sample too small to support one. A referee who has taken your club six times over three seasons has told you nothing about the seventh.

What the appointment does tell you, if you follow it closely, is where an official sits in the pecking order at that moment. A referee who takes a title-relevant fixture at a full ground in April is being trusted. One who spends the same weekend on the Championship is not being punished, necessarily, but the pattern over a run of weeks is readable, and it is the closest thing to a public performance table English refereeing has. More on the competition itself sits at our football section and across the wider England guides hub.