On 26 June 2026, a deadline quietly passed and almost no one outside the tax profession noticed. It was the last day on which HM Revenue & Customs could seek permission to appeal the First-tier Tribunal’s ruling that football referees engaged by Professional Game Match Officials Ltd were self-employed for tax purposes. HMRC let it lapse. After nearly a decade of litigation, five tribunal and court decisions, and a trip all the way to the Supreme Court, the case is finally over — and HMRC walked away.
For owner-managed businesses, contractors, and anyone who engages people through personal service companies, this is worth more than a passing glance. The PGMOL saga has quietly reshaped how employment status is decided, and the way it ended tells you something important about where the risk now sits.
What the case was actually about
First, a point of accuracy that most of the breathless coverage skips. PGMOL was not, strictly speaking, an IR35 case. It concerned direct employment status for PAYE and National Insurance — were the referees employees of PGMOL, or self-employed? But the legal test applied is precisely the same multi-factorial assessment used in IR35 enquiries. So while you should not call it an “IR35 ruling,” its principles apply directly to off-payroll working. Treat it as highly relevant, not as a binding IR35 precedent.
The dispute ran for almost ten years. Along the way the Supreme Court, in 2024, handed HMRC what looked like a significant win: it confirmed that the referee arrangements contained both mutuality of obligation and a sufficient framework of control — the first two of the three classic limbs of the employment status test. On paper, that is most of the journey to “employee.”
HMRC won the early rounds and still lost the war
Here is the part every business owner should sit with. Having secured mutuality and control at the highest court in the land, HMRC still lost. When the case returned to the First-tier Tribunal to apply the full test, the judge stood back, weighed the whole picture, and concluded that — despite mutuality and control being present — the overall relationship was simply not one of employment.
The deciding factors were the ones that speak to genuine independence: the referees were free to decline appointments, there was no ongoing obligation to offer or accept future work, and they were subject primarily to regulatory rather than employer-style control. Standing back, the tribunal found the engagements lacked the defining hallmarks of employment.
The lesson is blunt and useful. Mutuality and control are necessary but not sufficient. Ticking the first two boxes does not make someone an employee. The third stage — the overall, “in business on your own account” assessment — can and did override the first two. If you have ever been told that the presence of some mutuality or some control settles the question against you, this case says otherwise.
The detail that should worry HMRC more than the result
Buried in the commentary is a finding that ought to give every business relying on HMRC’s own guidance pause. When the facts of the PGMOL case are entered into HMRC’s Check Employment Status for Tax tool — the much-promoted CEST — it returns an “indeterminate” result and suggests the case is finely balanced.
The judge reached the opposite conclusion. He found the case was not finely balanced, and that the referees plainly did not exhibit the hallmarks of employment. In other words, HMRC’s own status tool could not get right the very case HMRC spent a decade litigating.
This is not an isolated grumble. Use of CEST has reportedly fallen by 43% in the past year and 71% over two years, as businesses increasingly conclude that the tool no longer reflects the legal principles the courts have actually settled. If you are leaning on a CEST printout as your status defence, this case is a warning shot: a tool that returns “indeterminate” on a now-decided set of facts is a thin shield in an enquiry.
HMRC’s curious explanation
When asked, HMRC said taking the case to the Supreme Court was important because it “clarified how to distinguish employees and self-employed workers” and “confirmed our longstanding approach.” That sentence will raise eyebrows. The Supreme Court actually rejected a central plank of HMRC’s long-held position — its insistence that mutuality of obligation meant nothing more than payment for work completed. The Court held instead that the nature and extent of the parties’ obligations is a substantive factor to be weighed in the round. That is not a confirmation of HMRC’s approach; it is a correction of it.
The honest reading is that HMRC declined a sixth hearing because it did not fancy its chances re-running the multi-factorial argument — not because the result vindicated its position.
The caveats a responsible adviser must state
Before anyone treats this as a free pass, two important caveats:
It is a First-tier Tribunal decision. FTT rulings are not binding precedent. They are persuasive and instructive, but another tribunal on different facts could decide differently. The binding law here is what the Supreme Court said about how to apply the test, not the referees’ specific outcome.
It is fact-specific. The referees won because of their particular working arrangements — genuine freedom to decline work, no ongoing obligation, regulatory rather than managerial control. Status always turns on the facts and the working practices, not the label on the contract. Copy the contract without the substance and you gain nothing.
What this means for you — practical actions
If you engage contractors, or operate through a personal service company yourself, this is a good moment to revisit your position:
Look past the first two limbs. Do not assume that some mutuality or some control sinks your status. Build and document the wider picture: genuine right of substitution, freedom to decline work, financial risk, working for other clients, being in business on your own account.
Audit your working practices, not just your paperwork. A clause permitting substitution is worthless if substitution could never happen in reality. Tribunals look at what actually occurs. Make sure the day-to-day matches the contract.
Do not over-rely on CEST. By all means run it, but treat an “indeterminate” output as a prompt for proper advice, not a verdict you can hide behind. Keep contemporaneous evidence of the factors that point to self-employment.
Document the economic-independence factors. Multiple clients, your own equipment, the ability to profit from sound management or lose from poor management — these “in business on your own account” indicators carried real weight here. Capture them.
The PGMOL story closes with HMRC quietly conceding a case it pursued for ten years, after winning the points that were supposed to clinch it. The practical takeaway is not “self-employment always wins.” It is that the overall picture genuinely matters, that the courts have moved the emphasis toward the full assessment, and that HMRC’s own tools and guidance have not kept pace. For anyone managing status risk, that is both an opportunity and a reason to get your evidence in order before the question is ever asked.
This article is general commentary, not specific tax advice. Employment status turns on the precise facts of each engagement — take professional advice on your own circumstances.