Football referees need you to educate yourself
At least know what you’re abusing, you bad weirdo
Here we are again. I was sick for most of last week so I decided quite early on that I'd write about referees again for this issue because it's easy, I have firm opinions and the fuel never seems to run out.
For the second consecutive week I find myself having to point out that I selected this topic before football's various bedwetters spent the weekend and more blaming all of their ills on match officials rather than their own behaviour and inadequacies.
Let's get on with it.
Viva Ollie Watkins.
Football referees need you to educate yourself
It's always the referee's fault. Have you noticed that? No matter what anyone else did or didn't do, it always comes back to the basic notion that football is injustice. It makes you wonder why we, as supporters, subject ourselves to the misery of it.
Referees operate in the white waters of meeting furies. From one direction comes the extreme emotional burden on supporters, many of them unable to handle their rage. From the other comes the persistent and deliberate manipulation of officials in the name of a winning game plan.
These are unhelpful overlapping forces. Worse still, referees at the top of the game must contend with the sheer size and perceived import of football. The pressure must be beyond anything a properly wired human being could imagine.
Referees aren't normal. They put themselves in the worst position in sport on purpose. Whether it's the spotlit rage of the Premier League or the altogether more actually risky backwaters of non-league football, they truly choose to do a job that's both essential and unattractive.
Our qualified officials aren't just gluttons for punishment. There are, apparently, other ways to solicit that without having a middle-aged manager find ways of creatively calling-not-calling you a cheat because you didn't give his team a throw-in.
No, they're nerds too; nerds who love the game, who want to be part of it, who understand the impulse that drives so many of us, in our various ways, to wish to give something back. Nerds who know more than you about the Laws of the Game. And that's important.
Referees aren't perfect performers. They can't be and that shouldn't be the expectation or anywhere close to it. There's a widely accepted belief that refereeing is in crisis, even at an all-time low. It's put forward with the kind of conviction that can only come from people who feel something rather than know it. Is refereeing worse than ever? Maybe. It seems unlikely.
There are reasons to ask questions. The Video Assistant Referee is top of the list as the most compelling argument that things have never been this bad, but not because of decisions that end up right or wrong.
Howard Webb is the Technical Director of PGMOL – king and kingmaker of the referees. Webb, like most of his former colleagues in the field, was an alright referee who gave a few big decisions against your team that you remember.
His comments about VAR this season betray his lack of a sense of what it is to be a football supporter. Endless chirping about the need to get to the correct decision being the primary goal doesn't make it so. Webb might think it's worth gutting the game of its essence in the name of officiousness. He's wrong.
It's necessary for refereeing development that the officials at the top of the English game face higher expectations and more pressure. Some handle it better than others. Are there mistakes in law? Are there errors in interpretation and oversights in matchcraft? Sure. There always have been. Is it likely that one or two of the game's top referees at any one time enjoy the limelight a little more than they should? Of course. And it doesn't help.
The national conversation about referees and refereeing is at its lowest ever point, of that there can be no doubt. Even if we set constant outright abuse to one side, the very fact that refereeing is so prominent is a problem.
In a typical Premier League match there might be a big decision or two to make. Irrespective of the correctness of those decisions the remainder of the ninety minutes will be spent debating them. By full time social media will be rife with rage, death threats and vague accusations of vast corruption that only ever plays out in one direction.
Both managers will be asked about the referee, usually before anything else. Both of their responses will be circulated and amplified, controversy as a commodity. The facts of the matter will be lost in the maelstrom, the referee dismissed as a faceless conspirator until their face is needed as proof of something spurious. And that's when they get the big decisions right.
But the facts of the matter do matter, not just for the quality of discourse but in the proper understanding of it. Referees like facts. Referees work in fact as much as they can because that's what referees are like.
If we want refereeing to improve, whatever that means, one of the major challenges will be to stop football chatter fixating on supposedly controversial decisions all week.
Let’s look at one of the sources of such chatter, albeit one that was without controversy in and of itself, because it shone a light on exactly what referees have to contend with.
In the UEFA Europa League match between Rennes and Villarreal, the French team took a free kick. The ball hit the woodwork and came out, eventually ending up in the net during the next phase of play.
The goal was belatedly disallowed because the ball hadn’t touched anyone else between the free kick and the next touch by the taker after it hit the crossbar. It’s odd that the referee on the pitch didn’t call a half immediately but that’s beside the point for now.
TNT Sports, the current incarnation of the UK broadcast partner nobody wants, succumbed long ago to the temptation to dumb down for social media. They all do.
This tweet, for it was a tweet no matter what one pancake-faced neofash baby wants you to call it, looks harmless enough on the surface. Yet it betrays two noteworthy characteristics of TNT Sports, the author of the tweet, or both.
Firstly, they don't understand one of the most basic rules of football. Secondly, they lack the self-awareness or professional self-respect to refrain from shouting that fact for all to see. It's abysmal stuff but they're not alone in their Swiss-cheese knowledge of the Laws of the Game.
It's about time we respected what we don't know as much as what we think we do know. If you're going to be critical of refereeing decisions, know what you're talking about first. If your business model demands frothy takes about officiating, leave ignorance behind and stop insulting your audience by churning out talking points that are so simplistic they'd be laughed out of Boxpark.
The discourse is carried out by so many people with no knowledge that it should just be written off as the waste of oxygen it is.
One minute we're saying an elite professional got a decision wrong, the next we're gleefully exposing that we don't know the first rule they learned. You want to vehemently criticise a red card decision? I hope that's not you asking how many matches the suspension will be.
There have been occasions when PGMOL has published clarifications after controversies that amount to changing the rules to suit. There are no angels here. But there's no excuse to wade into the matter without knowing or finding out what the Laws of the Game actually say.
It's never been easier to access the publication at the heart of football. IFAB, the organisation responsible for football's law-making and guidance for interpretation thereupon, make the Laws of the Game available for nothing as a mobile app and also downloadable as a PDF.
You can keep the refereeing bible on your phone and your desktop for free. It’s updated every season with amendments clearly marked and navigable in that very striking sort of bolt yellow colour that pops up on the side of football boots every few years. Uncharacteristically for football bodies, it's extremely easy to use.
You owe it to yourself to do so. It's interesting to dive into the Laws of the Game as an enthusiastic amateur anyway and it's always advisable to understand what you're rattling about if you're getting a bit of a temper going.
But you owe it to football, too, and to the officials themselves. They get a kicking – verbally, if they're lucky – every weekend. The least you can do is plant your standing foot properly.
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