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As a former professional Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter, Shane Mansfield is familiar with intense scrutiny and physical pain. But one pursuit in his life became too much to take: football refereeing.
“I considered football just a war,” Mansfield recalls. “My job was to find who the bully was, who the a---hole was. When you turn up as a referee, it’s us against them from the moment you arrive.”
In 2021, after eight seasons, Mansfield quit. “I had a gut full of it, and I landed in a place that I wish I’d gone to a little bit earlier. The dissent is non-stop. Decision by decision. Passive aggressive – clapping you and walking away being dismissive.”
He recounts a common array of insults: “You’re having one…”; “It’s all about you…”; “F---ing terrible decision…”; “P--- poor.” For any grass-roots referee, these words are the inescapable soundtrack to doing their job.
Mansfield considers refereeing to be even more arduous than MMA. “Yes, I would say that,” he says. “It can be a lonely place.
“There’s just so much to do, and everyone’s constantly looking at you. In football, there’s unnecessary pressure on every single decision. A throw-in on the halfway line should not be as emotive a decision as a penalty in the 90th minute, but it seems to be.”
Mansfield rose from level 7 to level 3, reaching the Southern Premier, the sixth tier in English football. From the outside, his career was a triumph. Yet it did not always feel that way. He recounts one particularly harrowing experience.
“Standing in the middle of Torquay, 5,000 people are chanting nasty things about you. You’re wondering whether you’ve got that penalty in the first 10 minutes right or wrong. Managers are coming on the pitch and screaming and shouting at you. Plastic bottles are being thrown at you. The police are taking you off the pitch.”
“It don’t feel good saying it, but I just crumbled a little bit,” Mansfield admits. “I fell more and more out of love with football the longer I was involved.
“Referees suffering abuse – it’s baked into the DNA. Everyone knows it.”
And I know it too. Unlike Mansfield, I was emphatically not an MMA fighter. But, from 2008 t 2011, I was a football referee.
As a 17-year-old, I came to refereeing for two reasons. First, I loved football; unfortunately, like many referees, I wasn’t very good at playing it. Second, refereeing was a useful source of pocket money, and more interesting than the alternatives.
Over three years, I refereed around 50 games – all adult, a combination of men’s and women’s. The experience was, as they say, character-building. Refereeing men twice your age as a spotty teen is inherently challenging; even more so when the league, in all its wisdom, told the teams that I was making my debut. One player, to great laughs from his team-mates, put his hands down his shorts, and then tried to shake my hand.
Often, I would referee two games in a weekend, earning £65 or £70 while getting some exercise. Most players were reasonable. But it only requires a couple of abrasive characters to give a match an edgy feel: one overly-aggressive tackle often led to an even fiercer one in response.
With no linesmen provided in the low levels of Sunday league games that were my staple, every week I faced a question of whether to use “club linesmen” – generally a team’s substitutes – to determine offsides. Unless there was a good rapport between the sides, I preferred to do without linesmen.
This was an imperfect solution, given the challenge of adjudicating offsides while near the centre circle. Yet at least the decision was mine alone, rather than being determined by someone who I was not sure if I – or, as importantly, the players themselves – could trust.
“Watch your back on the way home, ref,” a player told me as I left after one game. I had given a penalty against his team. I was not sure if he was joking.
In this environment it is little wonder that, of the 37,000 referees today, about 10,000 quit the profession every year.
“On a weekly basis, I am dealing with stuff that shouldn’t be acceptable to any right-thinking person,” says Steve Oakey, the chair of the Referees’ Association. He is currently helping a 17-year-old who, while refereeing a junior game, was grabbed by the throat by a parent running onto the pitch.
“I was awarded £50 for getting punched in the face,” Robert Was says with a grim laugh.
In 2014, he was officiating a West Middlesex League game in Harrow. One player fell over in the 18-yard box, appealing in vain for a penalty. One of his team-mates then started shouting at Was across the pitch.
He recounts their interaction:
“I took my book out of my pocket and looked down in my book. Next thing, I was flat on the floor. He punched me in the face.”
In his shock, Was wanted to get straight back up but the club assistant on that side said: “Robert, stay where you are. It’s worse than you think.”
The linesman, from the same team as the player who assaulted the referee, handed Was his phone and told him to call the police. While Was made the call, the man who punched him collected his kit, picked up his 12-year-old son – who had been watching – and ran away to his car. The game was abandoned.
After the police arrived, they advised Was to go to hospital. Was was told to undergo an X-ray. He was fortunate that the damage was limited to a black eye. For being attacked, Was was awarded £50 in compensation. Only he never received the cash.
“Two years later, I got a letter from the court saying this guy was on hard times and couldn’t afford to pay the £50, so it was going to be scrubbed.”
Was’s story is not unique. Another referee, who prefers to remain anonymous, had refereed hundreds of matches, before taking charge of a Scunthorpe & District Saturday league match in 2022. He was 17 at the time.
In the 75th minute, a member of the home side was sent to the “sin bin” for persistent dissent. He was temporarily dismissed for 10 minutes, leaving the hosts down to 10 men.
Seeing his team-mate told to leave the field, the goalkeeper ran 40 yards to confront the referee. The keeper called the referee a “f------ queer”, and then received a red card. But he refused to leave the field.
“He was right in my face,” the referee recalls. “He started to get aggressive, shouting, screaming ‘You f------ what?’. The player squared up to the referee, and hit him with his chest.
The goalkeeper then needed to be restrained by team-mates. The referee feared that he could be attacked by him again.
The referee immediately abandoned the game. Some players continued to protest against his original decision; most tried to defuse the situation. One club official, he remembers, “physically walked me over to collect my bag, to collect the money, just that safety element.”
When he returned home, the referee was shell-shocked. “It sent me into anxiety and depression. It was a really, really challenging time.”
He did not officiate again for several months, during which he strongly considered quitting. He didn’t get a single call from the Football Association.
“The lack of support was really disappointing, giving your time to then be assaulted and then not get support from the FA. It’s like you’re just a number. You’re not a valued part of that community.”
Only support from an unofficial mentor persuaded the referee to return. “I’m pleased I did. But there was a lot of consideration to completely giving up.”
The referee does not just blame the player who attacked him. He also blames the Premier League. In the country’s greatest stadiums each week, thousands sing vitriolic anti-referee songs. On the touchline and in press conferences alike, managers openly flout their contempt.
“That is normalised. If you’ve got people on the TV getting away with it, why would you do anything different on a Saturday or Sunday morning?”
Ben Taylor, 36, has been a referee for 20 years, including in the Western Football League and FA Vase. He agrees that there is a link between what goes unpunished at elite level and what grass-roots referees endure.
“It does filter down,” he says. “You see it going on in the Premier League and it’s not dealt with, but we’re told to deal with it. There’s that disconnect.”
His most harrowing moment came while refereeing a local derby in the West Country. One spectator, renowned for being aggressive, abused Taylor incessantly; the referee asked him to leave.
“He refused. I said, ‘You’re going to leave’. He knew my name, my address, and stood outside my changing room, said he was going to be around my house that night to break my legs. I was living [with my parents] at the time.”
Taylor immediately contacted the referees development officer and the welfare the safeguarding officer. “They both advised me to go to the police and get an alert against my parents’ address, which I did.”
The player was dissuaded from turning up at Taylor’s house. “It was quite worrying, but actually looking back on it, I dealt with it right. I stayed away from the trouble, stood my ground, and just dealt with it the right way.”
Every week, hundreds of grass-roots matches across the country have the same problem: they do not have a qualified referee. Instead, the matches use officials provided by the home team – club officials, or even substitutes – instead.
On March 1 in Gloucestershire’s grass-roots leagues, 30 out of 119 matches did not have a qualified referee: one in every four. Should this figure be representative across the country, it suggests there is a shortage of 10,000 referees, believes Oakey.
The FA does not yet track the number of matches that are played without a registered referee. While the FA claims that there are more referees than ever, the number of matches played without a qualified referee could grow further as women’s football expands.
“Things have been steadily getting worse,” says Oakey. “The information that we’ve got at the moment does nothing to allay fears that we have got a crisis in refereeing numbers. It’s not clear how many we need, how many we have, and how many we are retaining.”
Retention is perhaps Oakey’s biggest concern. In some counties, half of all new referees are believed to quit after one season.
Around 40 per cent of referees are aged 25 or under. Yet two-thirds of all referees who leave the job are under 25.
“That’s the key demographic if you want to get people to the Premier League,” Oakey says. “There’s a cliff edge.”
The total number of referees, he explains, is inflated by young people undertaking the qualification to fulfil Duke of Edinburgh Award requirements, with no intention of entering the industry. “The absolute figures are based around a bunch of children coming forward. And we’re not sure that gives us what we need for the future.”
Among experienced grass-roots referees, the common complaint is the same. The job has never been more difficult.
“Some of the behaviour has definitely got worse since Covid,” says Taylor. He highlights one particular curse for referees: digital technology.
“There’s a lot more scrutiny. Everyone now has got mobile phones, and there’s always something that games being videoed or uploaded, and teams tend to think things haven’t gone their way.”
With social media, abuse can now continue long after the final whistle. Referees’ associations are often left asking clubs to remove derogatory posts. It is akin to a game of whack-a-mole.
“I have seen stuff out on social media: ‘We lost today, but that was down to poor refereeing performances’,” Taylor recalls. “You think, really, is that needed?”
Grass-roots referees have had a new tool: body cameras, worn on the front of the referee’s shirt. If a player becomes aggressive, a referee can activate the camera by pressing the button and this process also captures the 30 seconds before activation. Body cameras, first introduced in the 2023-24 season, are now being trialled in eight counties.
So far, body cameras have only been activated six times in 4,000 games. This suggests that the knowledge that referees are equipped with the cameras could be acting as a deterrent. Yet their very use is an indication of the sport’s toxic relationship between officials and players.
“How do you encourage your 14-year-old to do a referee course, because you love football, and say, ‘You’ll earn some good pocket money, better than paper rounds’,” asks Colin Marshall, who is 52 and secretary of the Derby & South Derbyshire Referees’ Association. “And, by the way, you’ve got to wear this body cam in case you get hit.”
He has a simple explanation for why so many new referees stop.
“They quit because of dissent and abuse,” Marshall says. “Those kids on the courses are 14 to 17, they’ll have an adult shout at them from the side, impact their confidence. And they’ll go and do something else at a lower rate of pay, because it’s no hassle and they’re not going to get abused.”
Since giving up football refereeing in 2021, ex-MMA fighter Mansfield has taken up rugby refereeing instead, in his new home Edinburgh. In rugby, he explains, “we just don’t accept,” the abuse that is a staple of football. “You cannot talk to a referee like that. You will be penalised. You will be sanctioned.
“Rugby affords me the time to call the captains in, explain myself with no dissent, no appealing, no screaming.”
One crucial contrast, Mansfield believes, is in how players and match officials interact away from the pitch. In rugby, match officials and the teams eat and drink together: “it avoids the them and us and we can discuss amicably things they didn’t agree with.”
After football matches, managers “tell you what you had missed and how you affected the game”. With the crowd joining in too, “it’s effectively bullying as they get to shout whatever they want”.
The landscape does not need to be so bleak. Eric Edge, who played in the youth set-up at Cheltenham Town and then professionally for FC Miami City, found that referees were treated far better in the United States.
“I don’t remember a single interaction with a referee that was negative,” he reflects. “It felt like they were seeking to understand. ‘Ref why is that a foul?’ Rather than ‘That’s a f------ foul ref!’.”
After training as a referee in the past year, Edge officiated in the Gothia Cup in Sweden, the world’s largest youth tournament.
“Funnily enough, it was an English team that I had an issue with,” Edge says, with a wry chuckle. He was assistant referee in a game that the English side lost to a Croatian team.
“As the game finished, the players started verbally abusing me and the referee. They got their phones out and started filming us as they were shouting ‘I’ll f------ slap you’ and ‘Stupid c---’. We had to get escorted away.”
After getting changed, Edge found the team waiting outside the venue. “The coach threw a case of water bottles at the car.”
Alongside refereeing in Gloucestershire adult football, Edge also worked in the children’s game. “I stopped officiating kids’ football because of the parents,” he explains.
When refereeing an under-12s match, Edge heard one parent called an opposing player “a little c---”. He stopped the game. Edge then approached the coach of the side with a player whose father had used the expletive.
“I went over to the coach and I said, ‘Look, I’ve heard this from a parent. You need to get him removed. Otherwise, I’m just going to stop the game’. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to tell him’.
“You could see that he was genuinely scared to tell the guy to be quiet. I said to him, ‘I’ll come over with you’.
“We went over and explained that because of his language, he needed to leave, and that if he didn’t, I would call the game off. He started shouting. Eventually, he left. Some parents – the way they act is crazy.”
The FA is making genuine attempts to improve the climate for referees. A new referees’ strategy, introduced in 2023, aims to make the role more enjoyable. From last season, points deductions have been introduced for teams who abuse referees.
The FA is also trying to reduce the barriers to entry, part-funding bursary courses for around 500 referees a year. Those on the schemes are saved from paying the county FA the full £120 or so that each course costs.
Oakey believes that the laws are “too complicated” at grass-roots level. This season, the Laws of the Game stretch to 215 pages. New referees are required to learn arcane laws about the requirements of a ball for a full international game. The International Football Association Board, Oakey says, should simplify the general laws, and then have a later section dealing with elite football.
Players themselves have scant knowledge of the laws, and often do not understand the law by which they are being penalised. Too many county FAs, Oakey believes, fail to provide new referees with enough support, not even deigning to send an observer to see a referee’s first matches.
For referees, the most essential change, though, would not be changing the laws of the game or improving the support structures, as welcome as these steps would be. It would be ensuring that players, managers and supporters alike remember that the men in black are also human beings.
“It stems from parents at the youth level, and also behaviour at the very top,” Edge reflects. “Parents shout all sorts of nonsense and it feeds into the way that their kids think. We are all accountable for the culture.”
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“I considered football just a war,” Mansfield recalls. “My job was to find who the bully was, who the a---hole was. When you turn up as a referee, it’s us against them from the moment you arrive.”
In 2021, after eight seasons, Mansfield quit. “I had a gut full of it, and I landed in a place that I wish I’d gone to a little bit earlier. The dissent is non-stop. Decision by decision. Passive aggressive – clapping you and walking away being dismissive.”
He recounts a common array of insults: “You’re having one…”; “It’s all about you…”; “F---ing terrible decision…”; “P--- poor.” For any grass-roots referee, these words are the inescapable soundtrack to doing their job.
Mansfield considers refereeing to be even more arduous than MMA. “Yes, I would say that,” he says. “It can be a lonely place.
“There’s just so much to do, and everyone’s constantly looking at you. In football, there’s unnecessary pressure on every single decision. A throw-in on the halfway line should not be as emotive a decision as a penalty in the 90th minute, but it seems to be.”
Mansfield rose from level 7 to level 3, reaching the Southern Premier, the sixth tier in English football. From the outside, his career was a triumph. Yet it did not always feel that way. He recounts one particularly harrowing experience.
“Standing in the middle of Torquay, 5,000 people are chanting nasty things about you. You’re wondering whether you’ve got that penalty in the first 10 minutes right or wrong. Managers are coming on the pitch and screaming and shouting at you. Plastic bottles are being thrown at you. The police are taking you off the pitch.”
“It don’t feel good saying it, but I just crumbled a little bit,” Mansfield admits. “I fell more and more out of love with football the longer I was involved.
“Referees suffering abuse – it’s baked into the DNA. Everyone knows it.”
I know what referee abuse feels like
And I know it too. Unlike Mansfield, I was emphatically not an MMA fighter. But, from 2008 t 2011, I was a football referee.
As a 17-year-old, I came to refereeing for two reasons. First, I loved football; unfortunately, like many referees, I wasn’t very good at playing it. Second, refereeing was a useful source of pocket money, and more interesting than the alternatives.
Over three years, I refereed around 50 games – all adult, a combination of men’s and women’s. The experience was, as they say, character-building. Refereeing men twice your age as a spotty teen is inherently challenging; even more so when the league, in all its wisdom, told the teams that I was making my debut. One player, to great laughs from his team-mates, put his hands down his shorts, and then tried to shake my hand.
Often, I would referee two games in a weekend, earning £65 or £70 while getting some exercise. Most players were reasonable. But it only requires a couple of abrasive characters to give a match an edgy feel: one overly-aggressive tackle often led to an even fiercer one in response.
With no linesmen provided in the low levels of Sunday league games that were my staple, every week I faced a question of whether to use “club linesmen” – generally a team’s substitutes – to determine offsides. Unless there was a good rapport between the sides, I preferred to do without linesmen.
This was an imperfect solution, given the challenge of adjudicating offsides while near the centre circle. Yet at least the decision was mine alone, rather than being determined by someone who I was not sure if I – or, as importantly, the players themselves – could trust.
“Watch your back on the way home, ref,” a player told me as I left after one game. I had given a penalty against his team. I was not sure if he was joking.
In this environment it is little wonder that, of the 37,000 referees today, about 10,000 quit the profession every year.
“On a weekly basis, I am dealing with stuff that shouldn’t be acceptable to any right-thinking person,” says Steve Oakey, the chair of the Referees’ Association. He is currently helping a 17-year-old who, while refereeing a junior game, was grabbed by the throat by a parent running onto the pitch.
‘I was attacked’
“I was awarded £50 for getting punched in the face,” Robert Was says with a grim laugh.
In 2014, he was officiating a West Middlesex League game in Harrow. One player fell over in the 18-yard box, appealing in vain for a penalty. One of his team-mates then started shouting at Was across the pitch.
He recounts their interaction:
“I took my book out of my pocket and looked down in my book. Next thing, I was flat on the floor. He punched me in the face.”
In his shock, Was wanted to get straight back up but the club assistant on that side said: “Robert, stay where you are. It’s worse than you think.”
The linesman, from the same team as the player who assaulted the referee, handed Was his phone and told him to call the police. While Was made the call, the man who punched him collected his kit, picked up his 12-year-old son – who had been watching – and ran away to his car. The game was abandoned.
After the police arrived, they advised Was to go to hospital. Was was told to undergo an X-ray. He was fortunate that the damage was limited to a black eye. For being attacked, Was was awarded £50 in compensation. Only he never received the cash.
“Two years later, I got a letter from the court saying this guy was on hard times and couldn’t afford to pay the £50, so it was going to be scrubbed.”
Was’s story is not unique. Another referee, who prefers to remain anonymous, had refereed hundreds of matches, before taking charge of a Scunthorpe & District Saturday league match in 2022. He was 17 at the time.
In the 75th minute, a member of the home side was sent to the “sin bin” for persistent dissent. He was temporarily dismissed for 10 minutes, leaving the hosts down to 10 men.
Seeing his team-mate told to leave the field, the goalkeeper ran 40 yards to confront the referee. The keeper called the referee a “f------ queer”, and then received a red card. But he refused to leave the field.
“He was right in my face,” the referee recalls. “He started to get aggressive, shouting, screaming ‘You f------ what?’. The player squared up to the referee, and hit him with his chest.
The goalkeeper then needed to be restrained by team-mates. The referee feared that he could be attacked by him again.
The referee immediately abandoned the game. Some players continued to protest against his original decision; most tried to defuse the situation. One club official, he remembers, “physically walked me over to collect my bag, to collect the money, just that safety element.”
When he returned home, the referee was shell-shocked. “It sent me into anxiety and depression. It was a really, really challenging time.”
He did not officiate again for several months, during which he strongly considered quitting. He didn’t get a single call from the Football Association.
“The lack of support was really disappointing, giving your time to then be assaulted and then not get support from the FA. It’s like you’re just a number. You’re not a valued part of that community.”
Only support from an unofficial mentor persuaded the referee to return. “I’m pleased I did. But there was a lot of consideration to completely giving up.”
Professional game makes it worse
The referee does not just blame the player who attacked him. He also blames the Premier League. In the country’s greatest stadiums each week, thousands sing vitriolic anti-referee songs. On the touchline and in press conferences alike, managers openly flout their contempt.
“That is normalised. If you’ve got people on the TV getting away with it, why would you do anything different on a Saturday or Sunday morning?”
Ben Taylor, 36, has been a referee for 20 years, including in the Western Football League and FA Vase. He agrees that there is a link between what goes unpunished at elite level and what grass-roots referees endure.
“It does filter down,” he says. “You see it going on in the Premier League and it’s not dealt with, but we’re told to deal with it. There’s that disconnect.”
His most harrowing moment came while refereeing a local derby in the West Country. One spectator, renowned for being aggressive, abused Taylor incessantly; the referee asked him to leave.
“He refused. I said, ‘You’re going to leave’. He knew my name, my address, and stood outside my changing room, said he was going to be around my house that night to break my legs. I was living [with my parents] at the time.”
Taylor immediately contacted the referees development officer and the welfare the safeguarding officer. “They both advised me to go to the police and get an alert against my parents’ address, which I did.”
The player was dissuaded from turning up at Taylor’s house. “It was quite worrying, but actually looking back on it, I dealt with it right. I stayed away from the trouble, stood my ground, and just dealt with it the right way.”
10,000 more referees needed
Every week, hundreds of grass-roots matches across the country have the same problem: they do not have a qualified referee. Instead, the matches use officials provided by the home team – club officials, or even substitutes – instead.
On March 1 in Gloucestershire’s grass-roots leagues, 30 out of 119 matches did not have a qualified referee: one in every four. Should this figure be representative across the country, it suggests there is a shortage of 10,000 referees, believes Oakey.
The FA does not yet track the number of matches that are played without a registered referee. While the FA claims that there are more referees than ever, the number of matches played without a qualified referee could grow further as women’s football expands.
“Things have been steadily getting worse,” says Oakey. “The information that we’ve got at the moment does nothing to allay fears that we have got a crisis in refereeing numbers. It’s not clear how many we need, how many we have, and how many we are retaining.”
Retention is perhaps Oakey’s biggest concern. In some counties, half of all new referees are believed to quit after one season.
Around 40 per cent of referees are aged 25 or under. Yet two-thirds of all referees who leave the job are under 25.
“That’s the key demographic if you want to get people to the Premier League,” Oakey says. “There’s a cliff edge.”
The total number of referees, he explains, is inflated by young people undertaking the qualification to fulfil Duke of Edinburgh Award requirements, with no intention of entering the industry. “The absolute figures are based around a bunch of children coming forward. And we’re not sure that gives us what we need for the future.”
Among experienced grass-roots referees, the common complaint is the same. The job has never been more difficult.
“Some of the behaviour has definitely got worse since Covid,” says Taylor. He highlights one particular curse for referees: digital technology.
“There’s a lot more scrutiny. Everyone now has got mobile phones, and there’s always something that games being videoed or uploaded, and teams tend to think things haven’t gone their way.”
With social media, abuse can now continue long after the final whistle. Referees’ associations are often left asking clubs to remove derogatory posts. It is akin to a game of whack-a-mole.
“I have seen stuff out on social media: ‘We lost today, but that was down to poor refereeing performances’,” Taylor recalls. “You think, really, is that needed?”
Body cameras brought in
Grass-roots referees have had a new tool: body cameras, worn on the front of the referee’s shirt. If a player becomes aggressive, a referee can activate the camera by pressing the button and this process also captures the 30 seconds before activation. Body cameras, first introduced in the 2023-24 season, are now being trialled in eight counties.
So far, body cameras have only been activated six times in 4,000 games. This suggests that the knowledge that referees are equipped with the cameras could be acting as a deterrent. Yet their very use is an indication of the sport’s toxic relationship between officials and players.
“How do you encourage your 14-year-old to do a referee course, because you love football, and say, ‘You’ll earn some good pocket money, better than paper rounds’,” asks Colin Marshall, who is 52 and secretary of the Derby & South Derbyshire Referees’ Association. “And, by the way, you’ve got to wear this body cam in case you get hit.”
He has a simple explanation for why so many new referees stop.
“They quit because of dissent and abuse,” Marshall says. “Those kids on the courses are 14 to 17, they’ll have an adult shout at them from the side, impact their confidence. And they’ll go and do something else at a lower rate of pay, because it’s no hassle and they’re not going to get abused.”
Football a different world to rugby
Since giving up football refereeing in 2021, ex-MMA fighter Mansfield has taken up rugby refereeing instead, in his new home Edinburgh. In rugby, he explains, “we just don’t accept,” the abuse that is a staple of football. “You cannot talk to a referee like that. You will be penalised. You will be sanctioned.
“Rugby affords me the time to call the captains in, explain myself with no dissent, no appealing, no screaming.”
One crucial contrast, Mansfield believes, is in how players and match officials interact away from the pitch. In rugby, match officials and the teams eat and drink together: “it avoids the them and us and we can discuss amicably things they didn’t agree with.”
After football matches, managers “tell you what you had missed and how you affected the game”. With the crowd joining in too, “it’s effectively bullying as they get to shout whatever they want”.
The landscape does not need to be so bleak. Eric Edge, who played in the youth set-up at Cheltenham Town and then professionally for FC Miami City, found that referees were treated far better in the United States.
“I don’t remember a single interaction with a referee that was negative,” he reflects. “It felt like they were seeking to understand. ‘Ref why is that a foul?’ Rather than ‘That’s a f------ foul ref!’.”
After training as a referee in the past year, Edge officiated in the Gothia Cup in Sweden, the world’s largest youth tournament.
“Funnily enough, it was an English team that I had an issue with,” Edge says, with a wry chuckle. He was assistant referee in a game that the English side lost to a Croatian team.
“As the game finished, the players started verbally abusing me and the referee. They got their phones out and started filming us as they were shouting ‘I’ll f------ slap you’ and ‘Stupid c---’. We had to get escorted away.”
After getting changed, Edge found the team waiting outside the venue. “The coach threw a case of water bottles at the car.”
Alongside refereeing in Gloucestershire adult football, Edge also worked in the children’s game. “I stopped officiating kids’ football because of the parents,” he explains.
When refereeing an under-12s match, Edge heard one parent called an opposing player “a little c---”. He stopped the game. Edge then approached the coach of the side with a player whose father had used the expletive.
“I went over to the coach and I said, ‘Look, I’ve heard this from a parent. You need to get him removed. Otherwise, I’m just going to stop the game’. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to tell him’.
“You could see that he was genuinely scared to tell the guy to be quiet. I said to him, ‘I’ll come over with you’.
“We went over and explained that because of his language, he needed to leave, and that if he didn’t, I would call the game off. He started shouting. Eventually, he left. Some parents – the way they act is crazy.”
New strategy needed
The FA is making genuine attempts to improve the climate for referees. A new referees’ strategy, introduced in 2023, aims to make the role more enjoyable. From last season, points deductions have been introduced for teams who abuse referees.
The FA is also trying to reduce the barriers to entry, part-funding bursary courses for around 500 referees a year. Those on the schemes are saved from paying the county FA the full £120 or so that each course costs.
Oakey believes that the laws are “too complicated” at grass-roots level. This season, the Laws of the Game stretch to 215 pages. New referees are required to learn arcane laws about the requirements of a ball for a full international game. The International Football Association Board, Oakey says, should simplify the general laws, and then have a later section dealing with elite football.
Players themselves have scant knowledge of the laws, and often do not understand the law by which they are being penalised. Too many county FAs, Oakey believes, fail to provide new referees with enough support, not even deigning to send an observer to see a referee’s first matches.
For referees, the most essential change, though, would not be changing the laws of the game or improving the support structures, as welcome as these steps would be. It would be ensuring that players, managers and supporters alike remember that the men in black are also human beings.
“It stems from parents at the youth level, and also behaviour at the very top,” Edge reflects. “Parents shout all sorts of nonsense and it feeds into the way that their kids think. We are all accountable for the culture.”
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