Looks like a job for the professionals

Nor are they going to do anything very different to prepare themselves for matches.

They will have stringent fitness checks and they'll have sessions where they meet to discuss the laws and their interpretation, and to analyse their own performances. But they have been doing all of that for many years. The only difference this season, one suspects, is that there will be photo opportunities at their bonding sessions, so that we are persuaded that they are being "professional".

Their refereeing will be rigorously assessed and they will only be allocated matches to ref if they do well enough. Great, but that is also what has always happened. Ask Uriah Rennie, the first black guy to referee in the Premiership. He was kicked off the Premiership list after assessors marked him down a few times - although he's now back on the list this season.

The method of assessment is being altered, however. The old system was to have a retired ref sitting in the stand and appraising the man in the middle. The old codger in the seats was meant to be incognito, but you could usually spot him because he was dressed as if he had just been to the Man at C&A closing down sale.

The new method will be to gather together video recordings of all Premiership matches and get a couple of blokes to go through them on Sunday and Monday.

Again, this seems like a cosmetic change designed to look modern and (you cannot avoid the word) professional.

So, if very little is really changing, why all the fuss? The answer, as is the case with so many questions about top-level football, is money.

Last season, referees were paid £900 per Premiership match. This season, they'll get a £33,000 retainer plus £500 per match. A referee who survives all the video surveillance could earn about £60,000 in the season, on top of what he takes home from his day job.

To people like Patrick Vieira that is no more than loose change. He's probably lost more than that down the back of his Porsche seat. Yet to many of the men and women watching from the plastic seats at the grounds or the sofas at home, it is a substantial sum, and therein lies the problem with this brave new world of so-called professional referees.

As my first witness, I'd like to call Mr Peter Reid, the Sunderland manager, who showed what a clear-headed thinker he is in the X-rated documentary about his club.

Last season, Reid said: "If I don't do my job I get the sack, if players don't do theirs they are left out, but I don't know what happens to refs. If we had professional referees you could certainly make them more accountable."

Let's run through that one more time. If Reid doesn't do his job he gets the sack. Yes, but if he makes an honest mistake (like buying Daniele Dichio and picking him now and again), he gets away with it. His players make mistakes all the time (opting to hit a pass to Dichio's feet, for instance) and get away with it. But if a referee makes a mistake amid the frantic, helter-skelter action of the match, Reid will be blaming him for his team's failure to win.

Reid is right about one thing. Referees will be more accountable now that we are calling them professional.

They've always been accountable to every TV pundit, every terrace expert and every loony tune with nothing better to do than ring a football phone-in. Now, all those critics will be able to say: "The referee is being paid a lot of money, but he made a mistake, so something should be done."

So the one prediction which can be made with certainty on the eve of the new Premiership season is that the level of criticism of referees will reach a more deafening crescendo than ever before.

That is the fault of the referees. Like Gabby Logan, they've gone for a rebranding. They have gone along with the pretence that they are a new, improved band of professionals so, like Bodie and Doyle, they are there to be shot at.

What's more (and here we move on to the contentious bit, which will offend you) they will be shot at by people who do not know the laws of football.

Now you are sure you know the laws, aren't you? You've played football or watched it for ages and, after all, it is a very simple game. Yet anyone who has bothered to take the referees' examination knows that most people are astonishingly ignorant about the laws and that there are commonly held misconceptions about them.

There are managers at the pinnacle of their profession, whose coaching I would not dare criticise, who show, by their comments, that they misunderstand fundamental bits of the laws of football and have no real comprehension of how the complicated relationship between referees and their assistants is meant to operate.

In my profession, sports hackery, things are worse still. I would like to bet that most of the names with which you are familiar from the bylines in your daily newspapers could not list the seven reasons a player can be booked or the seven for which a player can be sent off.

Does that matter? Well, these are the men and women who regularly pontificate about refereeing standards, give refs marks out of 10 or produce the meaningless, thoughtless whine about "the need for consistency" as if any two incidents were ever identical.

The level of ignorance among most TV and radio presenters, commentators and pundits is equally chilling. They make a living out of lambasting referees, but don't know nearly enough about the laws which the refs are using.

Nothing will ever change that. After all, us hacks and broadcasters are not accountable to anyone other than our bosses - but we'll still demand that the new, professional referees are accountable to us.