It is a
six-figure job, with plenty of travel, free tickets for the family and a world-class support
network. Frankly, it is almost as good as being a footballer, but English football’s
attitude to those who oversee 850,000 games a year is damaging the refereeing profession.
At the depths of the pyramid, well away from the Premier League and where most of the 31,735
Football Association-affiliated officials do their whistling, it is a very different
experience.
According to the FA’s own figures, the game lost nearly 6,700 referees last year. That
was an improvement on the year before, when nearly one in four referees quit.
The good news is that English football is replacing referees as quickly as it is loses
them. The bad news is that four out of five of these replacements are under 18, have done
the training course as part of a PE qualification or for their Duke of Edinburgh award, and
will quit within two years.
The explanation for why can be found on the touchlines of far too many amateur and youth
games every weekend, can be heard on radio phone-ins, and can be seen on TV and social
media.
The former head of the Professional Game Match Officials Limited, Keith Hackett, presided
over hundreds of games in a career that started when he was 16 in Sheffield’s local leagues
and finished just short of his 50th birthday in the Premier League.
“There is a different intensity in amateur and youth football to when I took up the whistle,”
the 75-year-old Yorkshireman told The Athletic. “The games are more competitive, more aggressive
and more difficult to control. A lot of the problems come from parents. It’s incredible
how much abuse referees receive from the sidelines.
“I don’t think the Match of the Day pundits realise the influence they have. I did some
big matches and made mistakes. But I don’t remember living with the amount of scrutiny
that today’s referees face.
“And these inexperienced refs are held to the same standards as the guys at the top
of the pyramid — that can’t be fair.
“I never felt frightened when I was a young ref. I wasn’t intimated, I was welcomed.
But the young refs now need a degree of resilience that wasn’t necessary 40 or 50 years ago.”
Martin Cassidy refereed in the Football League until an injury ended his hopes of reaching
the top-flight in 2006. He then spent seven years as a referee coach for the FA before
setting up Ref Support in 2016.
Now a charity, Ref Support is an independent voice for officials in the United Kingdom
and Cassidy, as its chief executive, thinks he knows why so many quit.
“Some go because they’re too old, some will go because they’re fed up of the abuse
and some will go because they can earn more money for less effort by officiating in unaffiliated
five- and six-a-side leagues,” he says.
But Cassidy also believes the authorities are failing to protect officials by being
too soft on violent players, a situation compounded by local police forces’ reluctance to get
involved.
“If Martin Atkinson makes a mistake in a game in London, is unlikely to get any grief
the following day at home in Yorkshire,” says Cassidy.
“But if you make a mistake on Hackney Marshes, you might see those players in the supermarket.
Your kids might get a mouthful of abuse or worse because their dad got somebody a three-game
ban.
“I know of a referee whose son plays in the Premier League. He was assaulted during
a game — a player tried to bite his nose — and he wanted to report it but his son
persuaded him not to because that team drank in the local pubs.
“Everyone who has played amateur football knows there is a bad team in every league,
the one that causes all the trouble. But there is still no robust system for dealing with
these things.”
Having introduced its Respect campaign to improve behaviour in 2008, the FA is keen
to point out that only 0.01 per cent of those 850,000 games include an incident of assault.
But Cassidy says that is still two a week — “two-a-week too many” — and wonders
how many incidents are unproven or unreported. Even Field, whose organisation tends to be
less critical of the FA and county FAs, thinks the real figure is much higher.
For Cassidy, Field and Hackett, the answer is much tougher sanctions.
The recommended sanction for making physical contact with an official is a six-month ban.
This could be pushing the referee or snatching their cards away. For actually striking an
official, the ban can be five years or even life.
While the FA has tried to make sanctions more consistent across the 50 county FAs with centrally
appointed disciplinary panels, they all wonder why more indefinite bans, known as ‘sine
die’ suspensions, are not being dished out.
Ref Support has also lobbied hard to allow officials to wear body cameras but the idea
has been ruled out by the game’s law-making body the International Football Association
Board, of which the four British home nations are permanent members.
The FA believe there would be child protection and data privacy issues if referees use body
cams. Cassidy dismisses this and said he is consulting lawyers over a possible challenge
to the IFAB ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“Refereeing can be brilliant but it can also be better,” he adds.
On this point, Field agrees but his answers to the problems are slightly different.
First, as the FA’s numbers would suggest, recruitment is not the issue. In fact, there
are waiting lists for training courses as there are only 500 tutors in the country.
Field would use some of the £35 million county FAs have sitting in their bank accounts as
“rainy day money” to double the tutor pool.
“There are people queuing up to give us money — let’s make that easier,” he
joked. But he also wants to give new referees a lot more for their tuition fees, which range
from free to £180 depending on which county you try and how badly they need referees at
that particular moment.
He believes fewer referees would quit if the training was better and there were more opportunities
for continuous personal development. At present, only referees who want to progress beyond
level five on the pyramid — senior county referees — have to refresh their knowledge
or prove their fitness.
More money for training would also make it more likely that good, young, active referees,
who tend to be trying to climb up the ladder, would be willing to act as mentors, observers
and tutors.
Field wants the FA to do more for its officials. He points out that the FA’s refereeing budget
is about £1.8 million a year, less than it pays England manager Gareth Southgate.
“If you want a headline”, said Field, “you could say the chairman of the RA thinks
the FA should double the budget,”
This year, he has also been working hard with the Home Office and Sports Minister Nigel
Adams to persuade the courts to “realise an assault on a referee is not just a football
matter”. Field wants the sentencing guidelines changed so attacking a referee is treated
in the same way as an assault on a police community support officer or traffic warden.
But he is less convinced by the latest iteration of the FA’s Respect initiative: putting
officials under the age of 18 in purple shirts or yellow socks to highlight the fact they
are children.
“Isn’t it sad that it’s come to this?” he asks.
For him, any adult who abuses a young official should be sent on a safeguarding course and
if they come from a club with FA charter status, the club should be in trouble, too. Field
believes clubs with poor disciplinary records should not receive grants from the football
authorities.
Cassidy is another who sees the purple-shirt idea as well-intentioned but fundamentally
depressing.
“What does the purple shirt idea say about how we treat referees? “he asks. “Can
you imagine having to point out to people that this person is a child in any other walk
of life?”
He is also fed up with those who abuse officials on social media.
“We’ve seen guys with senior roles at clubs saying such and such ref ‘needs shooting’
or is an ‘effing cheat,’” he says. “I am a big believer that the abuse of referees
evolves in the same way that crime does and if you don’t nip it in the bud you are asking
for trouble later on.”
But despite the annual churn, the scorn from the sidelines, blockages in the pyramid, Twitter
trolls and VAR controversies, Cassidy, Hackett, and Field agree on one thing.
“It is a fantastic career,” said Field.
“I often say to young referees that somebody has to take charge of the 2039 FA Cup Final
—
it could be you.”