Who would be a Premier League referee?

Even with the advent of VAR it is a difficult and thankless task.

Given the partisan nature of football, it's inevitable that decisions will unleash a wave of disagreement - sometimes even when they are 100% correct and fans are too worked up to accept the truth.

Now refs have to contend with social media and the unfortunate tendency of some football supporters to post whatever comes into their heads without thinking of the consequences.

The ugly side of the beautiful game presents itself more freely and vividly than ever before and, despite the best efforts of those who appeal to fans to refrain from abuse, it seems that players, managers and referees just have to put up with it.

The bookmakers comparison site, bookmakers.com, set out to identify the Top 20 most trolled referees in world sport. They looked not only at football refs, but also those officiating American football, basketball and ice hockey games.

It's hard to tell just how scientific the study is, but it reveals that we appear to have the most toxic football competition in the world - six of the ten most trolled refs are Premier League Officials.

Of those six, Heswall's Mike Dean comes in at number four.

Analysing social media activity relating to hundreds of world sport officials, bookmakers.com discovered that of 33,224 posts relating to Mike, 3,491 of them were negative.

Many of the posters will regard what they have to say as just a bit of fun, but it is worth recalling that a year ago Mike Dean referred to the police death threats he had received.

Anyway, here at Heswall Nub News we won't hear a word said against Mike Dean. He does a difficult job very well, and what's more, his passionate support of Tranmere Rovers has no doubt helped propel them to second place in League Two and hopefully automatic promotion.

Mind you, if Rovers have to get there via the playoffs there is always the chance we will get to see Mike celebrating - just as he did in 2019 when Tranmere beat Forest Green 2-1 on aggregate to reach the League Two play-off final.

This moment of footballing joy is at the top of this page.