True dat. Was it just an idiotic f up, or was there more involved? Who knows. And as long as the officials are crap, no one will know.
Having watched a lot of leagues, football stands out as the worst officiated by some distance. Of American sports, the NFL used to be by far the worst, because they had part-time officials. It's gotten considerably better, at least partly to do with VAR.
I expect a certain amount of big team bias, and home team bias, in all sports. Sports other than football are subtler about it. A good example was the Steelers win in the 2006 Super Bowl. There were three very close, important calls. All went the Steelers way. One was definitely correct. One was probably correct. The other was endlessly debatable. So the Steelers got an appreciable edge, because there were three debatable decisions, and all went their way. But a reasonable person couldn't call any of the calls wrong.
In football, you can watch, say, Mourinho at Chelsea intimidate officials and bully them into bending the rules in his favor. Same with the mobbing of officials. When you can see blatant intimidation go on in front of your eyes, you can't help but think some sort of intimidation or quid pro quo behind the scenes is likely. Football doesn't pass the smell test.
Sports that do, like rugby, the NBA, the NHL and MLB, feature officials who act like kings of their castle, and don't take s***. Officials in football remind me of junior teachers with shady pasts getting bossed by the rich boys who know all about them.
I did watch one fixed game, again involving the Steelers. It was very interesting. The fix was on the spread, not the outcome. So the Steelers would have won the game in any case, but the officials denied the other team a score which would have let them cover the spread--and cost the Las Vegas bookies a lot of money. The ruling was 100% wrong in the sense of not following the rules. When they tried to explain their nonsensical decision, they looked very nervous and ashamed. It got a certain amount of coverage, but no follow up.
Fixes clearly happen. Most, including me, think they're very rare. I do wonder sometimes.