Any ideas/insight on what the FA will do with 5-4's in regards to the way covid and lockdown is looking?
Welcome to the site Cash!
Everything is speculation right now. What we do know is that England is locked down until at least 15th Feb and most likely well into March as even if the vaccination goals are met in the coming weeks it’s likely to take another 3-4 weeks post Feb 15th for things to calm down.
It’s going to be difficult for leagues to complete the season, or even to get to a meaningful number of games before the end of the season, meaning that having a null and void season called is a massive possibility.
There’s two major problems if that happens (and I’m talking specifically to our county here):
1) A lot of referees got promoted from 5-4 last season, this was in expectation of the leagues restructuring. We went from a shortage of L4 referees and 5-4 candidates having to cover supply league middles in the previous seasons to a surplus of L4’s this year scrabbling around for games that are normally done by 5’s or below as they are not appointed.
2) Point 1 is exacerbated by the fact that on the marking league teams have played anywhere from 10-14 games. Most referees have done only a small number of games and had a handful of observations.
The major question for managing promotion and demotion to and from 4 and higher levels is how do you make it fair? Is it fair to demote a referee who has had only 1 observation and 4 or 5 middles? It’s even worse at L3 as the Contrib teams have played around 8 league games so far.
In a nutshell - too many L4 referees for the league structure this year (certainly in our neck of the woods) and no fair way of ranking referees based on the small number of games and observations completed, unless we see a whole load more football played, meaning that it’s going to be hard to promote and demote referees.
The only other routes to make more space in the ranks are either for the implementation of the delayed new league structures for 21-22 season (which is going to be tough with in effect the likelihood of 2 consecutive Null and Void seasons, which is going to make it a minefield) or hoping that more existing L4’s choose to go the specialist AR path - but it’s likely to be a really small number, I only know of 3 out of our pool who chose it this year and for one of them it was a straight choice between demotion back to L5 or specialist AR pathway.
I suspect that they’ll either Null and Void the season for referees, or they’ll do a continuation where games and observations from this season carry over and then there is a reckoning at the end of 21-22 season.