Football has an insane relationship with referees and we HAVE to change it
The game’s perception and treatment of its officials is rotten in every way and at every level
Myles Lewis-Skelly was sent off in Arsenal’s win over Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux last month. He thwarted a counter-attack by clipping Matt Doherty. He botched the foul – it was badly timed and the contact was uglier than intended – but referee Michael Oliver and VAR Darren England settling on a red card was a surprise.
Arsenal appealed the decision. It was an awkward challenge, deliberately and cynically a foul, but otherwise innocent enough. It’s not always possible to skirt around the Laws of the Game and just know by experience and common sense that something is or isn’t, but Lewis-Skelly’s foul just wasn’t a red card offence.
The appeal was upheld. Independent appeal panels are made up of three former professional footballers. Arsenal presented a wealth of evidence but the footage itself would likely have been sufficient. The Gunners took their three points, kept Lewis-Skelly in the line-up and battered Manchester City, but the aftermath on the game's periphery was appalling.
It’s too easy to overlook the reaction to the red card as the wild aggressions of a handful of Extremely Online idiots. That’s not true anymore, for one thing. It also didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was indicative of a serious problem that pervades football culture.
Let’s be clear about this: our relationship with referees is insane and it’s time for football to act.
So toxic is the conversation about referees that it feels necessary to point out a few things at the outset.
Arsenal have been mentioned already but they aren't unique or even remotely unusual when it comes to the reaction of their manager and supporters to decisions they perceive to have gone against them.
Indeed, Mikel Arteta, while he's crossed a line or two like anyone else, has at least vocalised his condemnation of the worst of the threats and abuse suffered by Oliver in the latest pile-on.
Mistakes do happen. Nobody would say referees get everything right because they don't and they can't. It might not feel like it when it goes against us but referees are part of the same human fallibility that makes football worth watching.
Perhaps most pertinently of all, refereeing errors or disagreements or whatever you want to call them – they still happen with VAR.
The only difference is that supporters’ expectations of accuracy have been raised by the introduction of VAR and accuracy, honestly, isn't even achievable to any greater degree than it had been achieved already. There are many problems with VAR. That one's in the top five.
I can't claim innocence here. Not even close. I'm a football supporter. I know how it feels when my team isn't getting the rub of the green or a big decision goes against them in spite of overwhelming evidence in their favour. I know what it's like to get angry about it. I know what it's like to go too far.
On the other hand, I've never believed in a specific conspiracy against my club or even that a particular referee has any agenda outwith whatever weird motivation made them want to be a referee in the first place.
There's corruption somewhere, no doubt. It's just not the sort of tame anti-my-team-for-some-reason workaday corruption parped about by supporters every time their team concedes a throw-in.
Football’s modern folk devil
In the early 1970s, the sociologist Stan Cohen authored a study into the way the British media reported on the two uneasily co-existent youth subcultures of the previous decade.
Cohen’s analysis examined the reaction of the media and wider society to mods and rockers, and his seminal research informed the sociological and criminological understanding of fringe cultures.
Leaning on the idea that the strength, tone and content of the reaction to these deviations from the social norm is in fact a part of what defines them, Cohen’s most celebrated work flipped the script: cultural and social outsider behaviours are created by culture and society.
Cohen’s study explored the reaction to violent subcultures of the 1960s, specifically the techniques and narrative construction of an enemy within.
The reaction to supposedly deviant behaviours among a particular group might include rumour, lie and legend, allowing the media to “leave behind a diffuse feeling of anxiety” about them, to put it in Cohen’s words. Reporting and portrayal don’t need to justify fear or anger or suspicion, merely to stoke it.
Thus, football has its modern folk devil. Lock your doors. Shutter your shop-fronts. Stick to well-lit roads when walking at night. Referees are everywhere.
There are, broadly, two claims made by flailing supporters about the integrity of referees. One is conspiracy, the other vendetta. They're both bullshit, mostly, though it would be naive to pretend neither is possible.
Bias is more than just possible; it's inevitable. But something we as a football public tend to ignore is that referees are weird.
Really, they are. Why else would they put up with us? Referees are referees above all else and bless them for that. The refs I know are lovers of football who've largely abandoned traditional supporterhood to just be refs.
Ramping up the rancour
The weekly furore about refereeing is as exaggerated as it is tedious. Some refereeing decisions are bound to be the subject of chatter and scrutiny but that screeching first layer of analysis is now dominant.
Supporters love to stick the boot in. They feel wronged, even scandalised, and decade after decade of cumulative fury has evolved – quickly and relatively recently, I’d argue – into a widely held assumption that something, anything, is up.
If we can’t put our finger on what it is, it must be working against our team.
Managers and clubs like to get involved too. While my personal irritation is with the snide accusatory insinuations through which outright allegations are made but left unsaid, the real point is that managers shouldn’t be playing to the extreme fringes of the supporter community and clubs shouldn’t be whipping those fringes into a frenzy.
The media spotlight on referees is reductive and unrelenting. Supposed or even manufactured controversies are the first topic discussed in television studios at half time and full time, sometimes to the total exclusion of the football.
Pinning the referee to the top of the punditry agenda should be the exception, not the default. It’s crazy that we’ve drifted so far away from that.
This is one of those rare situations in life where the context really doesn’t matter. It’s not good enough. That’s all there is to it, and we need to stop making excuses for ourselves and people in influential positions in the game we profess to love.
A ring of protection for referees
Football’s insane and unhealthy relationship with referees is a big problem and a lot of people won’t be all that keen on the solution.
Amid persistent demands for officials to be more accountable, more publicly assessed and more exposed, there lurks the uncomfortable truth that referees need more protection and football both owes it to them, and needs to provide it for its own good.
The game needs to build a ring of protection around its referees, not in the form of overzealous PGMOL defensiveness but by clubs, managers and the media leading the way.
Those parties should already be keeping a lid on their conduct. If they can’t, it’s they who should be held more accountable. People in the public eye speaking about referees with respect wouldn’t correct football’s relationship with its referees overnight but it would stop legitimising the outer reaches of the debate.
“Reporting and portrayal don’t need to justify fear or anger or suspicion, merely to stoke it.”
It’s open season on referees and it’s not acceptable. Clubs piling in – brazenly or slyly – gives people permission. Football Twitter has always been full of utter inadequates but the war on officials has become a matter of normal football discourse.
Clubs and managers need to take their share of responsibility but football supporters with a shred of decency need to moderate their behaviour too.
As for the rest of them, open accusations of criminality should be met with a legal response. If you’re going to state that a referee is a cheat or corrupt or a shill, you’d better be able to prove it.
If football stays on its current path, someone is going to get hurt. That’s not rhetorical – it already happens in the grassroots game and you can be sure the social framing of referees at the top plays a part in that.
Regardless, referees are humans. That should be the starting point and if we’re honest with ourselves, football is failing officials on even that most basic first step.
We must do better. If we don’t, we’ll have nobody to abuse, nobody to accuse, and no decisions to be made in the hole where football used to be.
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