Referees, the saying goes, do not want to be seen or heard. It is not ideal, then, when referees are so much in focus that they are seen, heard, talked about, pilloried and — in at least one instance — criticized for how they left the stadium after a game (before enduring, oddly, a public discussion about their taste in music).
This is the state of things, however, in England’s Premier League. As the season moves through its final stretch of games and Leicester City motors toward perhaps the most unlikely championship in high-level soccer history, the spotlight seems to be as much on the officials as it is on the Foxes, who need at most just 7 points from four games to clinch a magical turnaround from near-relegation in 2015 to title-winners this spring.
Leicester, in all likelihood, will finish the job. But the question of whether the Premier League — and the sport as a whole — is doing enough to help referees will linger. If nothing else, the events of the past week were a reminder of that and served as the latest call for soccer to integrate video replay into its matches as soon as possible.
Some problems are unavoidable. Jon Moss, the referee blistered publicly after sending off Leicester’s Jamie Vardy during a game against West Ham United last week, is a solid-enough official, but not one of the Premier League’s elite; unfortunately, Moss was almost surely working the Foxes’ match against Stoke City because the highest-ranked English referees were at a workshop over the weekend for officials who will be involved in this summer’s European championships.
Scheduling is always an element of the game, of course, and even if Mark Clattenburg or Martin Atkinson, two of England’s best, were available, there is no guarantee they would not have come under fire as Moss did. Nothing can account for an official having a bad day.
Video, however, can help avoid some of the types of situations that led Moss into a fire pit. Several appeals for penalties not assessed; a second yellow and subsequent red card to Vardy for diving; sumo-style grappling in the penalty area and on set pieces, the sort of hand-to-hand combat in which the aggressor and the aggrieved are typically indistinguishable; and then, in the end, a penalty shot by Leicester that was granted. All of these are among the most difficult situations for a referee to handle in real time and, with proper restrictions, could also be made significantly easier with video assistance.
But that is obvious. The more important consideration now is that the use of video replay gives the officials a far greater base of credibility from the start. Players, coaches and fans know that the officials have replay backing them up — or, sometimes, correcting them — and so the inherent mistrust of officials is lessened. Even if observers do not love a referee’s style, they can at least trust that he has the tape behind him.
That is the biggest reason the Premier League, and all the top leagues around the world, need to adopt replay sooner rather than later. Much of the emphasis from Moss’ weekend was less about his actual decisions — the late penalty was dicey, to be sure, but the call on Vardy was seen by many as courageous and correct — and more about what he wrote in his post-match report, when he detailed the over-the-top conduct by several players in protest of his calls.
Those reactions, which included a Vardy tirade that could lead to an additional suspension on top of the automatic one-game ban, were emblematic of a culture that perpetually treats referees as piñatas as opposed to important components of the game.
Piling on the referee is commonplace, in England and elsewhere. Some critics shriek for stricter discipline, while others shout that red cards “ruin the game” and officials need simply to “let the players play.”
After the Leicester game, the criticisms of Moss covered the entire referee-ragging cliché spectrum: The match was “too much for him,” said the former player Alan Shearer, while Mark Halsey, a former referee turned commentator, said Moss “lost the plot.” Peter Schmeichel, the former goalkeeper and the father of Leicester keeper Kaspar Schmeichel, simply wondered if Moss was on drugs.
It was all a bit hysterical, as per usual. Yes, there may be the odd instance when an assignor gives a referee a game that is over his head, but it happens far more rarely than angry fans might think. A more common problem is that refereeing soccer is hard, and having one man make the majority of the decisions over 90-plus minutes without any replay assistance is absurd.
Rugby, which uses video replay, demands that its players treat officials with respect. A single, solitary harsh word to a referee can be (and often is) punished with immediate ejection. Much of the reason that works is simply the code of the sport; part of it, though, is the presence of the screen. It makes sense, too: In an age of progress, technology — in refereeing and almost anything else — equals credibility.
Skill still matters, and the top referees in the top soccer leagues are, in many ways, celebrities. Clattenburg certainly knows that, as fans have, at various points, clamoured over the disappearance of his bald spot and clucked over his choice to eschew the typical postgame departure with his colleagues so he could rush to make an Ed Sheeran concert. (He was disciplined for breaking protocol on that one.) Yet a good reputation is not enough to make anyone immune.
The governing body that oversees soccer’s rules recently voted to institute testing for video review systems, and several national associations quickly took steps toward introducing potential arrangements. More should follow. At this point, video replay is the only way for the referees to get back to the place where they always want to be: the background.