A referee will wear a camera for Monday’s night’s Premier League fixture between Crystal Palace and Manchester United.
Integrated into the usual referee communications system for this fixture only, footage from Jarred Gillett’s head-mounted device will not be broadcast live.
Instead, it will form part of a programme to be screened later in the year to “offer further insight and education into the demands of officiating” at the top level, the Premier League said.
“We would like to thank Crystal Palace and Manchester United for their support with this project,” the Premier League said in a statement.
The Football Association (FA) began to roll out body-worn cameras in grassroots leagues as part of a trial in four counties in England last year to “improve participant behaviour and respect towards referees”.
Paul Field, president of England’s Referees’ Association, had said at the time verbal and physical abuse of grassroots referees in the country was getting so bad that lives were at risk.
This trial was expanded to eight county associations in December last year as figures showed allegations of serious offences against grassroots match officials had increased slightly.
There were 1,451 such allegations in 2021-22, an increase of 1% on the previous campaign when 1,430 offences were recorded, FA data revealed.
The figures, contained in the FA’s Annual Grassroots Disciplinary Review, also showed 72 allegations of an actual or attempted assault were made in 2022-23.
Of those, 53 led to charges being brought and 42 were proven, with 11 not proven on the balance of probabilities due to insufficient evidence.
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The treatment of referees has increasingly been in the spotlight over recent seasons across the English football pyramid and abroad.
In December last year, professional football in Turkey was suspended after a top referee was punched to the ground by a club president at the end of a match in the country’s highest league.
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