Blue cards, sin bins and football's phoney war on dissent
Sin bins don’t work in football and we already have the evidence
There are lots of things that annoy me about football, social media, and football social media.
As a football supporter and a social media professional, that tends to put me in a bit of a bind.
This week – not counting the main piece below – I have in my irate cross-hairs the greatest football social media sin of all.
Football clubs referring to their players by their first names on Twitter is vile and it must be stopped.
Blue cards, sin bins and football's phoney war on dissent
The reaction to the news that football’s lawmakers plan to trial blue cards and ten-minute sin bins was hostile. Reports that the International Football Associations Board (IFAB) had lined up testing were swiftly denied by FIFA, such was the vitriol.
Whether the initial whiff was briefed by or leaked out of IFAB, the chilly response was made all the more remarkable by the fact that dissent – one of the two offences for which the potential blue card would be issued – is generally accepted to be an issue that does need addressing.
Dissent is a problem. It’s possible to make an argument in bad faith that viewing it as such is somehow soft or weak, but dissent isn’t just an irritation or a question of preference. It creates a negative environment for officials in the elite game, the ultimate outcomes of which include conspiracy theories, defamation and the establishment of referees as a modern football folk devil.
In non-league, grassroots and youth football, the effect of that is tangible. Real people are really abused and really assaulted. Recruiting referees is all but impossible and it all starts with dissent on the field. Why, then, are sin bins not seen as a potential solution?
The blue card is a red herring. It’s undoubtedly part of the reason for agitation but the colour of the card is of little consequence. Likewise, the apparent desire to roll cynical fouls into the sin bin equation merely exposes it as the populist window dressing that it is. Football has a problem that most sensible observers recognise. Sin bins don’t fix it.
It’s telling that the discussion in the wake of the IFAB leak ignored almost entirely the fact that trialling sin bins in non-league – and let’s be honest, the idea of trialling something in meaningful matches is a fallacy anyway – has been happening for years. From the ninth tier of English football down, the National League System has sin bins.
There are no blue cards in non-league but there are ten-minute sin bins in place for dissent, along with a somewhat confused realignment of the logic of a yellow card. It’s out there in the wild and has been for some time. It’s already being faux-trialled. It’s already bedded in. We’ve already seen it in action. We’ve already got the data.
After the 2019/20 season, the Football Association hailed the performance of the sin bin in non-league and grassroots football. Temporary dismissals had, it claimed, reduced dissent by 38 percent across 31 participant leagues.
If that suggests that ten-minute temporary dismissals have significantly improved the amount of dissent faced by non-league referees, you should spend a few Saturday afternoons, ears wide open, at Step Five matches. There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The introduction of sin bins hasn’t reduced dissent. Not even slightly. There’s a case to be made that they’ve made the problem of endemic dissent worse rather than better. Sin bins have reduced the number of yellow cards issued for dissent. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a positive development.
The way the sin bin is applied in non-league is dysfunctional at best. It’s necessarily subject to the whims of referees when it has to be a zero-tolerance fix if it’s to have any chance of succeeding. Some referees are less affected by dissent than others. All referees are thick-skinned but some skins are thicker than others.
Officials have always had differing tolerance levels and that has predictably translated into their willingness to use the sin bin.
In a game that has referees with varying degrees of leniency and even a taste for giving some back every now and again, the end result has been to raise the threshold that dissent must reach before the average match official decides it must be dealt with. Thus, yellow cards for dissent decline but dissent does not.
Consistency between instances of dissent within the same match is an issue as well, but that’s by the by. The sin bin fundamentally fails in its only purpose and that, if a trial really meant a trial, would have knocked it into a cocked hat years ago.
It doesn’t work and that’s why football supporters – the people who know and understand the behaviour and motivations of football players intuitively – know instinctively that it’s a bad idea. Sticking a blue card on top just made it easier for them to dismiss out of hand.
There are other negatives. Taking a gobby player off the pitch for ten minutes is unlike sending one off permanently. It’s eminently manageable for the team that’s a player short, and so managing it is what they do.
Ten minutes (and it is, in theory, ten minutes of ball-in-play time) of attack versus defence later, they’re back to eleven against eleven and away they go once more. As unintended consequences go, that’s a doozy. It changes football at its root, and for nothing.
If sin bins aren’t the answer to a question everybody seems to agree is in dire need of one, then what is?
Maybe football will need to find a way to reshape itself a little bit around the radical notion of treating referees like human beings.
Maybe the game does need to crank up the harshness of repercussions and make clear to referees that dissent is not a matter for their discretion.
Hell, maybe the sin bin will emerge as part of what will surely be a multi-faceted fix. But let’s start at the beginning.
Dissent by word or action is a yellow card offence already covered under Law 12 of the Laws of the Game. Using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or action is a sending off offence. In both cases the wording is clear and no room is left for interpretation.
Until referees stop selectively putting up with those offences – and the uncomfortable truth is that they do exactly that – we simply can’t know whether or not we already have adequate legislation. Football should explore that avenue before messing itself up any further.
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“For me, sustainability has always been a big thing. It is something I take into account in every single decision in my life and to be part of a football club that is conscious of that, that is trying to put systems in place for fans, for workers, for staff and players too, to make things easier in order to have a greener lifestyle, is important and an inspiration.”
Héctor Bellerín of Real Betis on the importance of football’s environmental conscience.
Salty beef extracts
Ivory Coast’s Afcon win shows there’s no blueprint for tournament success (The Guardian)
Uefa faces mounting threats no matter when Aleksander Ceferin leaves top job (The Guardian)
‘Freddy Adu was just like Messi’: what happened to America’s Pelé? (The Guardian)
Troyes fans left feeling used by Man City’s multi-club model (i)
How Luton Town are defying the doubters with a ‘cutting edge’ transfer strategy (i)
Dessert
Major League Soccer has unveiled its adidas kits for the upcoming 2024 season and there are some proper scorchers.
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