Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card. Shall we have another look at it? Right there, you can see the point at which Michael Oliver’s ego makes contact with his anti-Arsenal bias. If you roll the tape forward a few seconds, you can see a clear movement of content creator towards webcam. But actually, if you look at it from the next angle, you could argue that under the current interpretation of technocratic surveillance capitalism creeping across many late-democratic western societies, it’s actually six of one and half a dozen of the other, Jeff.
Occasionally, and usually by accident, I will find myself in a conversation about referees. I can never keep up with them. Largely this is because most football fans have an uncannily encyclopaedic recall of every referee who has ever slighted them: their name, their home town, the full rap sheet, the exact look on their face when they waved away an appeal for a stonewall penalty at the Hawthorns in 2016. “Yeah, Darren Bond’s always had it in for us,” someone will say, and I can only nod dumbly.
For a long time I regarded this kind of behaviour as obsessional, highly heterodox, bordering dangerous. Over time, I realised the anomaly was me. I don’t know what the referees are called. I don’t know what they look like. Anthony Taylor is bald, and Jarred Gillett is from Australia, and Jon Moss had a record shop in Leeds, and is maybe retired. That’s all I have. This probably makes me an inadequate fan of the sport. But does it make me a better, happier, more rounded person? Look, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
The referees’ body PGMOL has called for a stop to the abuse directed towards Oliver and his family since the game at Molineux on Saturday. And, you know, good luck with that. Often – and with the best intentions – we are urged to regard referees as human beings with feelings, oblivious to the fact that they serve the very opposite function. Their entire purpose is to be emotionless, beyond feelings and compassion, a neutral punchbag in our weakest moments.
Now, nobody needs another sensible middlebrow columnist explaining in deeply patronising serif font that, actually, it’s the fans who are the problem here. And for those of us in the free seats, perhaps the first and most natural instinct in the face of all this blinding anger is simply to look away, to wave a dismissive arm, to deride it all as conspiracy hokum, to file “refereeing standards” away with “two-tier policing” and “legitimate concerns about immigration” as something over which the little people can obsess.
Of course, many things can be true at once. Threats against a referee’s family should be beyond the pale. Rage against referees is often a cheap shot against an easy target that in today’s climate is often rewarded with maximum social media engagement. That was almost certainly not the worst decision you’ve ever seen. The standard of refereeing is almost certainly not worse than it’s ever been. We are almost certainly not at a tipping point. But equally, there simply must be a better way of doing this.
Take PGMOL, a sort of floating body in the ether, run neither by the Football Association nor the Premier League and thus answerable to nobody but its own insatiable main-character energy, a body whose solution to every refereeing problem is simply more refereeing. More footage, more audio, more explanation, more statements. Referees announcing their decisions to the stadium. We used to have the Late Review and the Open University, great minds debating ideas on television. Now we have Michael Owen and Howard Webb talking about excessive force and judgment thresholds.
Take this to its logical conclusion and you end up with rugby union: not so much a sport as an endless litigation, where referees are akin to Islamic madhhabs, distinct schools of jurisprudence with their own inimitable interpretation of the laws. And of course it raises an insoluble paradox: namely, the sort of person who wants to be a referee in this context should almost certainly be barred from being a referee on grounds of egotistical weirdness alone. So what else is there?
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Well: less refereeing. Ideally no refereeing, or at least the very minimum level required to dissuade violent play and tactical fouls. Obviously VAR needs to be eliminated at once. Goalline technology can stay. If in doubt play on, and the disadvantage to creative dribblers is offset by the advantage to forwards trying to beat the offside trap. Above all I demand as little referee in my daily existence as physically possible. It should be illegal to know their names, where they’re from, what they do in their spare time. They should be highly paid and totally anonymous, perhaps with the aid of some kind of Squid Game outfit.
Does this fix things on its own? Of course not. Any solution to the “crisis of refereeing standards” is largely beside the point. The point is the sense of perpetual crisis, eternal rage, the slosh that turns the wheel of content, those beautifully pure feelings. In many ways the referee is the perfect vessel for these feelings: the idea of faceless surveillance, the sense that all control is slowly slipping out of all of our lives.
Referees are the sign reading “no drinks outside after 9.30pm”. Referees are why the road you used to take to work is now a flower box. Referees are the tech giant who can buy your entire year of labour simply by staying alive for a few seconds. From a distance it feels obvious that so much of the stigmatisation of referees is a sublimation of other grievances: fan disenfranchisement, rising prices, malign owners, useless administrators, a sport that at an elemental level no longer works for us. Well, let’s try taking the referees out of the equation. Then, maybe, we can make a start on the other stuff.
Source: theguardian.com
