Referees demand more cash and training for VAR upgrade

Scotland’s top referees are looking for a pay rise in return for releasing their VAR conversations.

Celtic’s win in the December 30 has unleashed an incredible media backlash on referees as a then 74 match run of SPFL penalties without conceding a penalty barely rated a mention.

Late on in the Derby match David Turnbull was wiped out by James Tavernier in the penalty box with assistant referee Callum Spence wrongly flagging for offside, no VAR check was carried out with the incident largely overlooked with the exception of Celtic fans online.

Within a week of their defeat the Ibrox Tribute Act released three statements to their media partners, the final one revealed that they had requested that Willie Collum isn’t involved in their fixtures.

Unlike a marginal offside call against Kyogo Furuhashi in December 2021 SFA refereeing chief Crawford Allan has gone in to hiding leaving match officials open to all sorts of attacks led by Ibrox media partners.

When the SPFL season resumes match officials will be under more pressure than ever to comply with the messaging coming out of Ibrox.

Last night the BBC website reported an un-named referee saying:

The leadership have no idea of the pressures we are under and they’re just not prepared to support us properly.

We need more investment and better training. They rely on a lot of goodwill from the referees but they seriously fail to understand the pressures that come with the profile.

VAR has only increased that and we sometimes feel like an afterthought.

It seems that minimal training has been given over VAR with Ian Maxwell and Allan choosing to stay silent on the media onslaught.

Having created the mess it will be a costly exercise to train and increase payments to all match officials- that funding can only come from the clubs that suffered through the 74 match run when they were being refereed to different standards compared to the club from Ibrox.