Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool or wherever: Lack of respect is not personal, it's business!

When Micheal Corleone explained to his elder brother Sonny that shooting Virgil Sollozzo and police Captain McCluskey in the film "The Godfather" is the correct thing for the family, he said: "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."

He could have been talking about haranguing Premier League referees. The reality of the current ‘lack of respect’ shown to referees is born from the simple premise that it’s good for business.

Every football fan knows that referees can be influenced; we’ve all seen it happen, normally in favour of the opposition, and it happens every week.

The reality of professional football is simple; if an advantage can be gained by crowding, shouting at, ignoring or gesticulating at a referee, you do it. To a professional footballer it’s as natural as breathing; it’s done without thinking as 99% of the time there is no downside to it.

Question every decision in the hope the ref starts to ‘even them up’. Put pressure on him so he knows before he blows his whistle he’ll be facing 11 angry players and a trial by pundit later on. Get the crowd on his back, you’ll start getting the 50-50 decisions then.

On top of that, the real referee abusers become stars. They get acres of column inches written about them, the airtime is full of analysis and the phone-ins are red hot about their conduct. In today’s football there is no such thing as bad publicity, and the more publicity you get, the higher your profile and the more you earn.

Managers, of course, know that no one ever got sacked for giving the referee a good tongue-lashing; in fact it shows you care, you're  passionate, and of course that it's not really your fault! So disrespecting the referee, someone absolutely no one cares about anyway, is a no-brainer, you’d be a fool not to do it.

So how do you change it? How can someone no one likes, most people don’t trust and who often does make mistakes during a game, ever expect to gain respect? Well, as the young ‘Don Corleone’ said, you need to make it good for business.

If every player who spoke back to the referee was instantly booked, how many of them do you think would do it? Sure it would be carnage for a couple of weeks but as soon as players realised there really is no advantage in doing it (in fact it would be exactly the opposite), they’d soon stop.

Take points off for dissent bookings, let’s see how much backing the errant player gets from his manager, chairman or fans then. It might even be good for the game if the players were fully concentrating on their performance not the referees.

And all this nonsense about it being a fast and passionate game; don’t be naïve, these guys are professionals and they know exactly what they are doing. It’s only us supporters who take it personally.

If you want to make the players respect the ref again make it good for business to do so. Otherwise, as any movie buff will tell you, we all ‘go to the mattresses’ and that isn’t good for anyone’s business.