Football’s obsession with deflecting blame on referees
Human beings are tribal creatures. Growing up, whether consciously or subconsciously, we learn how to behave as football fans from those around us. Family members, friends, people in the stadium, football coaches in post match interviews or even people we interact with on social media all influence our attitudes and thoughts as fans of the so called beautiful game.
Perhaps that’s why it took me many years to reach a simple realization: the referee is not my enemy. He’s not my team’s enemy, he doesn’t support the opponent (and even if he does, he wouldn’t intentionally harm his career and reputation to favor them) and he, most probably, would have nothing to gain from favoring the opponent. That might seem pretty obvious to some, but to the average football fan it really isn’t.
The referee has always been football’s favorite target to deflect blame. Fans of both sets of teams competing in any given match could agree on only one thing: the referee’s bias against their team. But in recent decades, as more money crept into football, the stakes for everyone involved (coaches, players, directors) increased, and so, naturally, the referee criticism went into overdrive by those whose lucrative jobs were dependent on match results.
The majority of coaches, emotional and full of adrenaline straight after matches, choose the easiest (and undignified) route of ignoring their and their team’s own shortcomings and shifting the blame to the man with the whistle instead. Many are guilty of that behavior at times, but for some it is actually a habit, simply a part of their routine.
With no one volunteering to protect referees, what began as unchecked emotional outbursts turned, through the years, into vicious, calculated, and personal attacks. Attacks that caused referees to receive death threats and retire like Anders Frisk (well done José Mourinho), or get attacked with their families in airports like Anthony Taylor (no, really, pat yourself on the back Mr. Mourinho).
The referee is the easiest scapegoat in the world, the equivalent of a punching bag; a man without a voice, or the right to respond. Referees know their role, and quite reluctantly, accept it. They are to be blamed (at best, and at worst, harassed or insulted) by twenty two men, two coaches, and two sets of fan bases for 90 minutes, all while earning so little (certainly compared to most other jobs in football) that they have to work other jobs. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, that carries on post match for days or sometimes weeks, while everyone in football from coaches to directors to media pundits piles the blame on them.
The Premier League markets itself as ‘the greatest show on earth’. And that’s exactly what it has become: a show, with little to do with football. It has turned into a circus, where the norm is for coaches to ask for matches to be replayed due to a referee error, clubs to demand official apologies and then deem it insufficient, or issue statements backing their coaches’ criticism of referees and seeking accountability. Accountability for what? For an error? Do they also seek accountability for every wrong tactical decision by their coach or every error that led to a goal conceded by their players? Aren’t these errors that cost points in the league table as well?
Why is there an obsession with absolute perfection from referees? It’s not like anything in football is perfect. We forgive players making tens of wrong decisions per game, and the same for coaches. Directors and scouts spend months, sometimes even years, identifying players or coaches to sign only to end up making the wrong decisions, time and time again. All that is tolerated. In fact, all those mentioned above make millions per year for only making, mostly, the wrong decisions. But a referee making an error of judgement in a split second action in a live sporting event? That’s scandalous, outrageous, and downright intentional.
Football has simply become incessantly toxic towards referees. Before FIFA decided VAR (video assistant referee) was the solution, it would have been been wise of them to consider what actually was the real problem. Was it in a human being (yes, referees are human) making a wrong decision out of hundreds in a 90 minute match? Or in grown men in formal attire unable to control their emotions post match, and choosing to protect their livelihood by hiding their own shortcomings and deflecting the blame to the easy target?
VAR would be perfect in an utopian world; where human beings (who are still needed to run the VAR) do not make errors and where all refereeing decisions are clear cut and undebatable. But in the world we live in, VAR translates into endless minutes of additional time, an infinite amount of needless stops in play, delayed and sometimes meaningless goal celebrations, and a minimum requirement of a master’s degree in geometry to be able to decipher a simple offside call. It has made football much worse, and turned the entire discourse around it to downright intolerable.
In fact, referee mistakes should simply be acknowledged, embraced even, as part of the game. Without a referee error, would Liverpool’s comeback in Istanbul have been possible (if the penalty on Gerrard wasn’t given)? Would the greatly celebrated Barcelona and Real Madrid sides from recent years have won as many Champions League titles as they have done? The examples are endless.
In Italy, they still debate a referee decision from 1998, when Internazionale were facing Juventus in practically a title decider and the referee did not call a penalty for Ronaldo Nazário (Inter) only to then call one for Alessandro Del Piero (Juve) in the same minute, causing uproar that remains until this day. If a simple decision could be debated for 25 years without reaching a conclusion, then what exactly are we doing?
It’s simply baffling how no one realized that many decisions in a match are actually debatable and not clear cut, in spite of the laws of the game; hence no team will ever be fully satisfied with refereeing decisions, no matter what. Let alone the fact that it is human nature to error, and referees are human, so like coaches, players, directors, and even fans, they should be excused an acceptable amount of errors.
Football is a lot more enjoyable when accepting the fact that a refereeing error is liable to happen, just like an injury to a key player, or a ball hitting the post instead of the net. Why? Because football, like life, is full of random events, many of which are out of our control. Our job then becomes pretty simple: to roll with it, and attempt to control only what we could control.
Maybe it is utopian to expect football coaches to do that, but it’s simply inexcusable for everyone involved in football not to strive to do better. Referees should be protected, supported, and not turned into punching bags. Otherwise, the game that was once called beautiful would continue to turn increasingly ugly.
