The refereeing crisis is about the bonds that bind us rather than Chelsea

This week it’s Chelsea and next week it’ll be someone else, but the ‘crisis in refereeing’ is actually something deeper and more worrying.

As with so many of the world’s problems, the most difficult question about the current perception of a ‘crisis’ in refereeing is ‘where does this all end?’ It’s a fair question. Not a single weekend goes by without another set of supporters claiming a ‘conspiracy’ against their club. Okay, fair enough. I’ll come back to that. But where does this all end?

To be absolutely clear, this isn’t really about Chelsea vs Spurs. It isn’t about Chelsea. The events of Sunday afternoon and the reaction to them are a symptom of a problem within the game rather than a cause, but this is a problem with potentially threatening consequences for the Premier League, a growing issue that they are going to have to grasp because the fundamental lack of trust that now seems to exist between the game’s stakeholders and those who watch – and by extension pay – is one of the fault lines that has the potential to destroy the golden goose that their product has become over the last three decades.

At its heart, professional football is a society and all societies depend on trust in order to function. This extends through every area of the game. We trust the owners of our football clubs with their custodianship, and to spend vast amounts of money to try and improve our teams. On match days, we trust that gathering tens of thousands of people into small areas will be stewarded and policed to ensure our safety. And we expect that matches will be won and lost fairly, adjudged by officials who are unbiased and refereed according to the laws of the game.

So, first things first, then. Is there a conspiracy against your team? No. Of course there isn’t. Don’t be so daft. After all, what exactly would the benefit be? The Premier League has grown fat off the back of carefully cultivated and marketed image. Would all concerned seriously risk all of that – because one of the things that may well destroy that carefully-guarded image would be a concrete revelation that all referees were meeting once a week like the Stonecutters in The Simpsons to decide who will win, lose or draw each round of matches – for… well, it’s difficult to say what benefit this even would serve, really.

Because Anthony Taylor ‘hates Chelsea’, or whatever? We’ve already reached the point at which so many people are claiming…