It has been revealed that the English Football Association has had to deal with three times as many incidents of players interfering with refereeing decisions or mass player confrontations than they did one year ago.
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The revelation comes just days after Chelsea were widely derided when all of their outfield players surrounded a referee in an attempt to get Zlatan Ibrahimovic sent off in a Champions League match with Paris Saint Germain.
The Observer reports that so far this season 16 clubs have been charged by English football’s governing body of failing to control their players in this way.
This is almost a threefold increase from the same stage of last season where six clubs from the Premier League to the Conference National had been warned of their conduct.
The debate over such behaviour continues to rumble with Chelsea responding to the criticism in a especially cheeky way on social media with an Instagram post targeted at Jamie Carragher and Graeme Souness for their critical comments.