English football has a refereeing crisis. Far away from distant and parasitic Twitter bottom feeders talking about Premier League officials as biased automatons is the very real abuse those lower down the profession face on a regular basis.
Non-league and grassroots referees are treated appallingly. They are sworn at and threatened, intimidated and assaulted, and the problem appears to be growing. It’s a problem from the bottom of the game to the top, but where elite referees are subjected to language, non-league referees are exposed to real life.
The way refs are spoken to in the professional game isn’t to be excused but there’s an easy way to distinguish them from the rest: they might get sworn at too much and accused of dishonesty or worse, but they don’t get punched in the face and they’re not walking away in their hundreds every year.
There is a shortage of officials in many of the county football associations in England – probably all of them. Non-league officials get paid a small amount but in almost every case it’s not enough to keep them involved without a real love for football.
Anecdotally, covid stoppages have broken the habit for a lot of those who’ve given it up. The time to reflect on whether it’s worth the abuse has given them a reason not to return. That’s a problem.
With rising reports of serious violence against referees comes a number of proposed solutions, most recently a charitable provision of bodycams to be made available as part of a campaign whose first objective is to get the International Football Association Board to allow them in the first place.
That level of surveillance would be a grim indictment of the behaviour that we as supporters, players and managers inflict upon officials. It’s not an appealing idea because it seems so distant from what we want non-league to be.
Wearable camera technology has evidentiary value and might even act as a deterrent, but it doesn’t remedy the actual problem at hand. The behaviour of an arsehole is his own responsibility. Building an infrastructure around it absolves him of the need to grow up and be better.
I am not an innocent bystander. I, too, am an arsehole. But I’m trying not to be. As I’ve got older, I’ve found that having my furious say either at or to match officials comes with an uncomfortable clarity as standard, even in the moment. It’s a curious mix perhaps best described as shame and embarrassment with a dollop of guilt on the side.
In short, I know it’s wrong – it’s also futile, but that’s beside the point – and instead of doing it anyway, I’m trying to take the rather more obvious approach of acting on that knowledge.
Did spending my formative years as one face in a crowd of 42,000 desensitise me to the humanity of our referees? Sociologists have been studying adjacent matters of crowd behaviour since football’s emergence into Victorian life. Or perhaps I’m just an embittered soul with more anger than sense.
Ultimately, the why doesn’t much matter. I’m not proud of myself so I have tried and am trying to do something about it. Talking to officials before and after games as an occasional matchday secretary has only reinforced the simple need for basic human decency.
It’s not easy to swear in the face of a man with whom I was drinking tea two hours earlier. It’s not a bold thought but it has been a liberating one, and it’s why I hope I’ve grown from one of the loudest and most aggressive voices into one heard only supporting my team. To be clear, I’m not proud of that and I don’t consider it an achievement.
But that’s just me. Referees all over England have to deal with abuse and worse from supporters, players and managers every week. There’s never been a tangible plan to deal with that, no real consequences for any of us, and crunch time is here.
We all need to work together to cut this blight from our game. Dealing with one problem at a time won’t suffice. No matter how much we reduce on-pitch dissent and abuse, supporters are often worse anyway – not to mention practically impossible to police. The truth is that we, the supporters, need to have a look at ourselves.
Worse yet are the parents who do untold damage to youth football in England with their conduct at pitchside, of which making life hell for the officials is only one part. There is and must continue to be a wider discussion about their presence and behaviour; young referees are the ones expected to take charge of these matches and are frequently subjected to worse abuse than anything the men’s game would throw at them.
Sadly, when the football public is asked how the sport can increase respect for referees and end the violent incidents driving them away, the response focuses too often on the referees themselves. The issue is flipped as a reflex. They’re the problem. If they were better, they wouldn’t get abused.
Yet they do have a part to play. Supporters are as annoyed by some of the players’ shenanigans than any poor decision made by the officials. Diving and cheating are irritating and supporters often feel affronted when they see them but the officials don’t. Time-wasting is the same and dissent, ironically, is the same too.
Referees have tools at their disposal to deter players and managers from treating them poorly. Yellow cards for dissent are remarkably uncommon given the stick the officials face, and red cards for foul and abusive language are rarer still. Some referees even have the use of a sin bin, which, despite its total lack of impact and increasingly infrequent use, is still in play.
These desperate times need not call for desperate measures just yet. With more cautions and dismissals for dissent, more consistent deployment of the sin bin where it’s applicable, the situation should improve. It’s not a case of victim blaming but advocacy for a holistic strategy to resolve a simmering and quite serious issue.
Therein lies the fundamental flaw with the bodycam. It might be a useful way to gather evidence when the worst happens – it should remain in the conversation for as long as it’s necessary, if for that reason alone – but it’s not going to get to the heart of the crisis on their own.
Lower level football will only stop losing officials when we’re all invested in the solution. We should be already. If we were, the dystopian introduction of body-mounted surveillance into our recreation time wouldn’t be needed anyway.
So let’s look at the whole problem, the real problem, all at once. Abusive behaviour not being observed and captured is secondary to the fact that it happens in the first place. We should start by tackling that, which means recognising that abuse starts with dissent and looking at ourselves as supporters, players, managers and, yes, as referees too.
Let’s stop acting like arseholes. And let’s stop putting up with players who cross the line. Let’s book them and bin them and send them off. It’s not easy for any of us to change these behaviours but the time to do so has long since passed. It really is the only way.
If we want a game to watch and play and officiate, we no longer have a choice.
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Chris Nee
@SphinxFtbl