Refereeing needs transparency to help battle outrage culture

Steven Chicken

If you haven’t already, take four minutes and 12 seconds and watch this Australian referee – coming soon to English shores – performing his duties while he and his assistants, including the VAR, are wearing microphones for broadcast.

Is that really so difficult and terrible and painful that it can’t be done in every televised game? What are they afraid of? That the referees will be too charming and reasonable like this guy?

Frankly, even if it turned out most referees were fundamentally dislikeable, it’s not as if their general levels of popularity could get much lower. An impartial fan could at least play devil’s advocate in favour of the overwhelming majority of ‘controversial’ decisions, so even incorrect calls are often just the right side of inexplicable; but when they go against our team, you better have warmed up your vocal cords, because chances are some ultra-high-pitched incredulity will ensue.

The standard issue broadcaster post-mortems of each refereeing decision are effectively just a presenter leading two or three pundits through the dark, step by step.

Did the referee see this little push here? Don’t know, here’s a guess.

If he did, why did he think it merited a foul? Don’t know, here’s a guess.

And if that was was given then why not the similar one at the other end 20 minutes earlier? Don’t know, here’s a guess and an incredulous remark.

And what was that booking for? Did the player say something or did he think the foul was really that bad? Don’t know, let’s spend a few more minutes guessing, come on, big talking point, this is definitely normal and healthy and hugely entertaining and definitely isn’t just encouraging more abuse against officials.

Football is so obsessed with protecting the sanctity of The Referee’s Decision Is Final that the governing bodies put up huge opaque walls around the officials: no audio feed for the broadcasters, no post-match interviews, no insight into the actual thought processes that go into each decision.

The Referee’s Decision Is Final not because we believe they are perfectly infallible arbiters who never make mistakes, but because you have to have someone on the field who can exercise some authority and control in order to apply the rules. It is a principle that works in person at the ground or on a park, where questioning a decision that cannot possibly be seen again is futile and undermines the officials’ authority.  Not being privy to the referees’ thought processes is immaterial when nobody observing the game is able to rewind and check the incident for themselves in slow motion.

But under the scrutiny of TV cameras, that equation changes. But if you’re privy to those thought processes, and you’re given numerous slow-motion replays from multiple angles, and you already have a pre-existing bias towards one team or the other, then it’s much too convenient for your mind to skip to the conclusion that ‘this referee is useless’ or, much worse, ‘this referee is corrupt’. And once you’ve got into that mindset, every single repetition of those replays just makes it all feel more and more unjust and raises that impotent rage higher and higher.

Some people will always react this way no matter what – football is a broad church, and that naturally includes various flavours of angry, idiotic and conspiratorial. But seeing the work that goes into the job on that video would surely help, and hopefully remove a lot of the uncertainties that lead to those unbecoming post-match TV dissections. It’s much less fun to pick over a mystery when the solution has already been given, and that would hopefully halt some of the more vicious bile from rising.

That’s not just in the actual mechanism of how a decision is made (“from the first pass he was fine, it’s the middle one he’s no good”), but the little moments of humanity, like the referee telling his assistants, “good stuff lads, [the player] has accepted it”, or a player at the end of the game coming over to tell the referee: “I appreciate it. All the best for the future.”

It’s the little details that help people to stop defining a person by their job and start to see that they are fallible human beings. And that is what officials need right now – not the supposedly protective but really just dehumanising walls of silence currently erected around them.

Steven Chicken is on Twitter