Three things change about how Premier League refereeing is explained when the season starts on Friday. The full judgements of the Key Match Incidents Panel will be shared with supporters for the first time. Selected direct quotes from referees and video assistant referees will be published on the league's match centre account, its website and its app, giving an official's real-time reasoning rather than the general summary of an incident that used to appear. And RefCam will for the first time broadcast audio of a referee talking to players.
The panel is the significant one. Five people have been meeting every week since 2022-23 to dissect every major decision, three of them former players and coaches plus one representative each from the league and the refereeing body now called Pro Ref. They assess the on-field team first and the video assistant second, on the understanding that the higher clear-and-obvious threshold means a referee can be judged wrong while the VAR is judged right not to intervene. A simple majority settles it. Until now the verdicts were private, feedback for clubs and officials only, though clubs had a habit of leaking them anyway. They also set referees' performance-related pay.
What the audience actually complained about
The measures land on a specific grievance rather than a vague one. When the Football Supporters' Association surveyed just under 8,000 fans of all 20 top-flight clubs earlier this year, more than half of them regular matchgoers at 15 or more games a season, three-quarters said they were against the use of the video assistant referee at all. The more useful number is the one underneath: 74% said the reasoning behind VAR decisions was not clear. Another 72% disagreed that VAR had made refereeing more accurate, 90% disagreed that it had improved the matchday experience and 86% were worried about its remit expanding.