Why Refereeing Is Fucked
On the 20th of February 1992, the Premier League was formed. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Money flooded into the game, mostly via broadcasters, who gained an outsized influence on not just the transmission of the matches but the structure of the game itself, as modern “let it flow” directives and punishment of time wasting are introduced primarily to benefit the game as entertainment package. Any account of the state of Premier League refereeing has to start here.
This is the age of pundits: professional and amateur, establishment or insurgent and grassroots. Discussion of the game is mediated and led by a small pool of people whose popularity is increasingly determined by their ability to provoke a response. There was a brief window a few years ago — during the rapid growth of fan media, as the old tight-trousered dinosaurs of Match of the Day struggled to keep up — that I saw it mooted that the democratisation of football coverage might force broadcasters to up their game. Provide better insight than, “he’s got to get that on target”. This happened to a narrow extent, with Sky providing deep dives and Shearer getting taught to draw some triangles on a screen. Mostly, however, the establishment broadcasters cemented their position by cornering the market on outrage.
If a striker falls and there is nobody there to see him, was it a foul? There is a basic numbers problem here: the larger the game, the more eyes on it, the more people who can see mistakes. This problem for officiating cannot be solved. The game is global and anyone can access real time slow-motion clips moments after the incident. Anything which happens on that scale, and largely online, will come with a significant quotient of insane people. And, due to algorithmic mechanisms which we’re all well familiar with, those people become more prominent than they should do. It’s tempting to blame this on social media “trolls”, but the truth is they’re only competing in a market already dominated by Sky and BT.
For many years — pre- and post-VAR — every half-time and post-match analysis was dominated by refereeing decisions. Pundits mutter about disgraces, zoom in, jab their fingers at the screen. The discussion moves around to ‘standards’. The manager has a pop in the post-match press conference. Phone-in shows follow immediately after, hosted by the World’s Most Annoying Men, directly inciting furious fans driving home in their cars to call in and express their fury. These moments are all clipped up and shared on socials for maximum impact. Not trolls, but Robbie Savage, who is far worse than any supernatural creature.
Recently there has been something of a rapprochement between pundits and referees, as part of Howard Webb’s media strategy. Having identified that the frantic atmosphere around decisions wasn’t helping things, he decided to make a deal with broadcasters. They could have access to referees on the broadcast itself to explain decisions and interact with pundits. Accompanying this there seems to have been a general will from the PGMOL to insert itself into discussions and manage reactions. Troy Deeney even admitted to getting direct texts from referees to ensure that the line is being adhered to.
This might have had the short term effect of limiting criticism on major broadcasters, but it hasn’t done anything to calm fans. Quite the opposite — it has exposed the workings of the PGMOL in a way which isn’t at all flattering to them. In becoming active participants in the discourse they have shown that circling the wagons is always the first priority. Thus we are treated to ludicrous situations like Mike Dean claiming to agree with a referee twice, once on first viewing and once more after the decision was completely reversed.
The horse has bolted with respect to outrage culture, which now persists through streams, watchalongs and discords in its own feverish form, but it exposes a more fundamental question. Are officials actually any good? And how do we judge them?
There are reasons to be sympathetic for officials with respect to public knowledge. There are several problems which are hard to surmount. The first is ignorance. The laws of the game are difficult, boring, and accompanied by many guidelines. Nobody knows them all. Sometimes, egregiously, referees don’t know them. They aren’t helped by the fact that the laws, or at least their interpretations, are constantly changing, sometimes only for a few weeks, before the public outcry grows enough that they are quietly shelved without any official announcement. Needless to say this is not a good way to create a body of law.
The problem is so common that a cult cartoon called You Are The Ref appeared in the Guardian for a decade, coming up with outlandish and contradictory scenarios for the reader to officiate. Webb’s public-facing strategy seems designed to address this in part, except sometimes the rules are so abstruse that explaining them only makes them worse, especially when identical-seeming scenarios are given the opposite way the next day.
Therein lies the second problem: consistency. There are several contradictions built into punditry and football fans in general. One is the simultaneous demand for consistency and for common sense. In the jurisprudence of football, these are not compatible. Consistency means applying the letter of the law in the same fashion, regardless of game state, player conduct, past behaviour, future consequences, importance of the game, etc and so on. Common sense, as construed by the Talksport Man, means doing the opposite. It means not “spoiling the game”. It means recognising when a warning is sufficient. It means managing the players and the occasion and maintaining a sense of authority.
You cannot complain about one today and the other tomorrow, but that doesn’t stop anyone. Do you want a narrowly legalistic consistency which occasionally produces silly outcomes, or do you want the referee to take a more central interpretive role in the match and make different calls every week? Pick one (I would prefer the more narrow, consistent approach — at least this way players and teams can modify their approaches around it, knowing they’re going to happen — fairness is maintained, if some moron gets himself sent off in the first minute of a derby that’s his lookout).
VAR and its protocols are another way in which the football-watching establishment has talked itself into believing multiple contradictory things at once. Do you want decisions to be fast, or do you want them to be correct? You cannot have both. This manifests as complaining about the texture of the game being spoiled by lengthy interventions and then complaining that decisions are taken too quickly or not subject to review at all. Again — pick one. I am inclined to agree that the game as a spectacle is the most important thing — I would be happy to have fewer reviews and more wrong decisions if it came down to it. Something like a review system could potentially achieve both (or at least give teams some autonomy in identifying the decisions they believe to be particularly wrong).
VAR itself has also been subject to contradictions. Certainly almost everyone wanted it before it came in among the punditocracy, those same people who now spend their whole time furious at its excesses and failings. But put them in front of a rare cup game without it and, as simple as flipping a coin, they’re complaining about its absence. These contradictions partially flow from ignorance, but also from the warped incentive of outrage broadcasting. It is in their interest to always be upset, because that is where views come from. The well is poisoned.
What VAR has mostly done is amplify the failings of English refereeing. It has shown that the old-boys network of officials will cover for each other even when given the opportunity to change decisions. The PGMOL — an organisation badly lacking in diversity, which itself likely contributes to its ossified, wagon-circling approaches — should safeguard the fair application of the laws. Referees are human, and nobody could say they don’t think the occasional colleague or customer is a cunt. They are subject to unconscious bias like all of us. Research has repeatedly shown that officials disproportionately target players of colour. Officials also speak fairly openly about issues of bias outside of race — they consider player reputations, and their status with their national teams. One former official wrote that he trusts in Harry Kane’s character as the captain of the England national team. David Coote recently lost his job for railing against Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool. None of this is good, but a responsible organisation should expect it and mitigate against it.
Howard Webb, the technical director of the PGMOL, was a police officer with the South Yorkshire police in a past life, and you can see echoes of it in his approach. There is an easy explanation for this. Both organisations deal in law and justice and so require a certain degree of public consent and trust to operate. This creates paranoid mentality where any criticism is seen as weakening the trustworthiness of the institution, and so is itself undermining. Admitting fault would mean admitting weakness, and a weak lawmaker cannot expect anyone to follow its laws (or so the argument is made).
This is wrong, of course. Public confidence is even more undermined by injustice, secretive behaviour, ineffectiveness and a lack of accountability. With police, as with referees. And, like your average copper, referees have a tendency to believe that the law only exists in one place — inside their head. Much like post-structuralist views on literature, the law is created not in the text but in the unique interaction with it by the individual, the referee. This is policy. The primacy of the On Field Official is paramount to English officiating. The right to manage the game and use laws to enforce behaviour on players according to their interpretation of the player and the occasion. This is baked into VAR protocol (decisions made on the field are unlikely to be overruled — why?) and is largely not shared by football-watchers. It is therefore unsurprising that referees (the ultimate neoliberal subject ?) frequently seem to see themselves as the stars of their own show. This is their match, and they’re going to take control of it.
This tendency gives us what have been called ‘celebrity refs’ — referees who it is perceived are attracted to high profile games, big decisions, confrontation and controversy. There is no way to prove this, but I would not consider it a surprise if those drawn to positions of authority have a corresponding petty egotism (there’s a whole essay to be written on Referees As Coppers alone), especially considering the enormous fame that comes from the new age of broadcasting. This comes with its dangers too, such as the unkind and unedifying treatment of David Coote, forced to out himself to the Sun and clearly manipulated into producing blackmail material for someone.
So: you have a game being run by broadcasters, to an audience of outraged customers who don’t understand the rules, officiated by unaccountable and unconsciously biased white men, and according to an abstruse and constantly shifting set of laws. What’s to be done?
There are no good answers, and the ship has sailed on many of the concerns, but here are my suggestions.
- Hire foreign referees. They come from different cultures, don’t have the same institutional ties, and can be headhunted as the best in the world. This can only benefit the league. Should the “best league” not have the best officials?
- Reform the PGMOL. Exactly how this is done is beyond me, but it needs to be diversified and change its approach completely to be both more robust to outside criticism and more isolated from the discourse surrounding it. There needs to be more accountability and transparency.
- More money for referees down the pyramid. The job is extremely difficult to do, without even considering the culture of fan (and player) abuse. There needs to be a deeper talent pool to draw from, through the leagues and down to amateur level. This money should be levied on Premier League clubs by the FA. It also reduces the need for referees to go and work in Gulf states and muddy the waters.
I don’t suppose any of these would make much impact, so maybe the only realistic thing to do is reach a point of nihilism with it all. There are ample reasons to mistrust Premier League football after all. Sportswashing, rapists, disgusting quantities of money, the erosion and pricing out of local fanbases. Add officiating to the pile and you might be forced to accept that the whole thing is compromised beyond repair. I know many who have come to this conclusion already. Maybe the next bizarre red card can be the radicalising act you need to go to your local non-league team instead, and never have to listen to Gary Neville again.
