Stuart Attwell has not been involved in a single Nottingham Forest match — as referee, fourth official, or VAR — since April 2024. That isn't scheduling coincidence. That is a deliberate policy from the PGMOL, and it raises some uncomfortable questions about who really controls referee appointments in the Premier League.
The backstory: Attwell was VAR for Forest's defeat to Everton at Goodison Park, a match that produced three penalties for the home side during a relegation battle. Forest's response was to post a tweet identifying Attwell as a Luton Town supporter — Luton being another club caught in the same survival fight. The FA came down hard. A £750,000 fine, a record for a social media offence, and a public condemnation describing it as an attack on officiating integrity "on an unparalleled scale."
The authorities backed Attwell completely. Then quietly removed him from anything involving Forest.
Who actually won that fight?
There's a real tension here. The PGMOL has precedent for keeping officials away from clubs — Kevin Friend never handled Bristol City fixtures given his support for them, and Mark Clattenburg was distanced from Goodison for years after a contentious 2007 Merseyside derby. Those decisions make intuitive sense. This one is different.
Forest were the ones who behaved badly. They were fined a record amount. And yet Attwell — a FIFA-listed official who became the Premier League's youngest referee at 25 — is the one with restricted assignments. Three months ago, he was quietly pulled from Forest's FA Cup tie at Wrexham and replaced by Darren England. The PGMOL won't explain why.
The suggestion that Attwell cannot fairly officiate Forest fixtures is difficult to take seriously. What this actually looks like is an institution managing optics rather than principles — which is precisely the kind of thing that erodes trust in officiating over time. Forest's odds-compilers would tell you nothing about Attwell's decisions changed after that tweet. His competence didn't change either.
Liverpool's brightest spark faces the hardest road back
Elsewhere, Hugo Ekitike's Achilles tendon rupture — suffered during Liverpool's Champions League defeat to PSG — is every bit as serious as it sounds. Around 20 per cent of professional footballers who suffer the same injury fail to return to their pre-injury physical level. One in five, permanently set back. That framing matters when assessing what Liverpool might get back and when.
Ekitike had been one of the few genuine positives in a difficult Liverpool season. He won't be at the World Cup with France. He'll miss many months. And even after surgery, the early rehabilitation is so restrictive that basic walking is heavily limited — the full recovery arc is long, non-linear, and not guaranteed to reach the same endpoint.
ACL injuries tend to dominate the injury conversation in football, but the Achilles carries a different kind of dread. The ACL recovery is brutal in duration; the Achilles is brutal in its ceiling. Twenty percent never getting back to where they were isn't a small number. For a player of Ekitike's profile and age, that's the statistic that will sit in the background of every rehabilitation update between now and his return.
