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Mike Dean’s outlandish claims do no favours to his former Premier League colleagues.

Only two matches into the new season, Premier League referees are already up against it.

There have been very few controversial flashpoints in the opening fortnight of the new English top-flight campaign, yet match officials have once again been dragged into intense scrutiny through little fault of their own after Mike Dean’s supposed revelations.

Speaking on Jamie Vardy’s ‘Having A Party’ podcast, Dean made a string of extraordinary claims, saying he used to ‘joke about’ while officiating in the Premier League before the arrival of VAR. He claimed to have played a number of ‘secret games’, including not blowing his whistle until the 20th minute and trying to remain in the centre circle for as long as he could.

Professional Game Referees moved quickly to cast doubt on the 58-year-old’s attention-grabbing account, stating that there is no credible evidence to indicate he ever carried out such antics before VAR was introduced in the Premier League for the 2019/20 season.

Even so, Dean’s version of what he did ‘as a laugh’ while taking charge of English football’s showpiece fixtures has now cast fresh suspicion on those who continue to officiate after he retired in May 2022.

Dean is fully aware of how harmful false impressions can be. In 2021, he received death threats after showing red cards in back-to-back matches to West Ham’s Tomas Soucek and Southampton’s Jan Bednarek, both of which were later overturned on appeal. On a less serious level, the closing years of his career were also overshadowed by accusations that he favoured Liverpool because of two fictional sons who supposedly held season tickets at Anfield.

At best, his comments sound like something out of Walter Mitty: completely unsupported by factual evidence and lending weight to Arsene Wenger’s December 2017 response that he was ‘not honest’ — a remark that resulted in the legendary Arsenal manager receiving a three-match ban and a £40,000 fine. But if Dean’s words are taken at face value, he has created the potential for serious and lasting damage to his former colleagues and to the regulatory body overseen by Howard Webb.

This is far from the first time Dean has landed in controversy. In 2023, only months after stepping away from VAR duties, he admitted he chose not to intervene over Cristian Romero pulling Marc Cucurella’s hair in Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur’s heated 2-2 draw because he wanted to spare his ‘mate’ Anthony Taylor ‘more grief’. Nor is he the first retired official to say too much from the comfort of a podcast chair. Mark Clattenburg notoriously said he allowed Spurs to ‘self-destruct’ while refereeing ‘The Battle of Stamford Bridge’ in 2016, the match that confirmed Leicester City as unlikely champions.

Hearing these alleged stories from the past creates the impression that the officials still trusted to enforce the laws of the game belong to a morally bankrupt old boys’ club, not unlike the one portrayed in the referees’ episode of the sitcom ‘Inside Number 9’.

Football supporters already have a growing distrust of referees, as shown by the immediate chants branding the Premier League ‘corrupt’ after almost every contentious decision. Allegations of bias towards or against particular clubs involving some of today’s best-known officials continue to spread both inside stadiums and across social media echo chambers.

Webb has tried to reduce that hostility by lifting the lid on in-game conversations between match officials in his monthly video segments reviewing contentious decisions. At times, the PGMOL chief has even admitted that his own referees got calls wrong.

Yet Dean’s comments, whether accurate or not, have instantly weakened those efforts to improve transparency and persuade fans that impartiality still guides the people responsible for making sure matches are played according to the laws of the game.

Now every decision, however small, is likely to be viewed through a lens of mistrust, all because of Dean’s latest attempt to snatch another 15 seconds of fame.