Former Premier League referee Mike Dean has admitted that he used to play secret betting games with his assistant referees during matches, including seeing how long he could go without blowing his whistle or leaving the centre circle.
Dean made the admission during an interview with Jamie Vardy, the former Leicester City striker who won the Premier League title with the club in 2016, on Vardy's podcast Jamie Vardy's Having A Party, released on September 2. Dean officiated 553 English top-flight matches between 1985 and 2022, and spoke about the games with a notable lack of embarrassment, prompting strong reactions from the public and from senior figures in refereeing, who consider it a problem for an official not to show the seriousness and commitment the role demands. Dean, for his part, said referees also had to know how to have fun.
Going 20 minutes without a whistle
Among the most controversial games was seeing who could go longest in a match without blowing the whistle at all, a bet that appears to have greatly amused the officials involved. English referees have long had a reputation for letting games flow with minimal intervention, and Dean said this tendency was pushed to an extreme in some matches. He said he had done it several times in the Premier League, before the introduction of VAR, going 20 to 25 minutes on a few occasions without blowing his whistle, letting play continue rather than stopping it.
An even more troubling game, Dean said, involved seeing how long he could stay inside the centre circle without leaving it. He said he would stand in the centre circle and see how long he could remain there before having to move, describing it as him simply joking around. He said his assistants on the touchline would tell him he could not do it, to which he would reply that he would try, running around a little but staying inside the circle. He said he once managed to stay there for about 15 minutes during a match, despite a referee normally being expected to stay close to play in order to make accurate decisions.
Football world reacts with anger
According to the British press, the confession has gone down badly with football's governing bodies. Many have complained that some matches may have taken a different course because of these games.
Gabriel Agbonlahor, a former Aston Villa striker who is now a pundit for talkSPORT, did not hold back in criticising the referee. Agbonlahor said Dean was trying to be funny but that it was not funny at all, and told him directly that he was not funny. He said Dean was throwing himself under the bus and that he did not like it at all, adding that he found himself thinking about how many matches Dean had refereed that he himself had played in. Agbonlahor closed his comments by calling Dean an idiot.
