Referees: Are they getting worse and do they need technology?

One way or another, referees in football are rarely out of the headlines. In fact it’s pretty rare for a week to go by without some kind of fallout over a perceived injustice from the man in the middle’s decision making. Just in the last week we’ve had debates over the refereeing performance in the Chelsea v Manchester United clash, Celtic writing a letter of complaint to the SFA over the referee in their Scottish Cup semi-final defeat, and a rather bizarre story regarding the appointment of Jon Moss to referee next month’s FA Cup final.

No match can go ahead without them, but refereeing does appear to be a rather thankless task. Correct decisions are often ignored, while incorrect decisions are rounded on by pundits seeking to make a name for themselves, while vitriolic abuse is often hurled in the refs direction from players, managers and fans alike. Anyone who has attended a grass roots match, even a children’s match, knows the situation is often little better here.

Referees in England came in for a particular amount of stick during the Christmas period, with former referee Keith Hackett describing standards as “bordering on appalling”. As a former holder of the whistle, what Hackett says clearly carries weight. So the first question is this: Are referees getting worse?

Managers would seem to think so, as they clog up their post-match interviews with criticisms of the referee every time they lose, be that of the refs fitness, or nerve, or perhaps their eyesight. Not surprisingly, correct decision making from referees is not easy to quantify, but figures from Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) say that correct decisions are at an all-time high, with 95% of major decisions being correct. They also say refs are far fitter than before.

Now PGMOL may have their own agenda here, and we don’t necessarily need to take their word as gospel, but there is little by way of stats to suggest they are definitively wrong. To say refs are getting worse would also be to imply that “back in the old days” refs always got decisions right and never made mistakes. Anyone who remembers Diego Maradona’s �?hand of God’ in the 1986 World Cup, or watched virtually any of Argentina’s matches at the 1978 World Cup, knows that argument is a complete fallacy, and anyone who says otherwise is at best extremely naïve.

The key difference between referees past and present is not a question of standards, but a question of television and technology. Nowadays, every decision a referee makes can be forensically analysed, re-analysed, slowed down, and seen from a multitude of angles, so that pundits, fans and armchair viewers can all come to their own conclusions in a manner that was far more difficult in previous decades. Referees are no worse than before. They’re mistakes are simply highlighted more than before.

So attention turns to the second question: Should there be more technology in football to help referees? It is a question that is rarely far from the lips of pundits, commentators and FIFA officials, and technology has been introduced successfully in other sports, so why not football? As it is, the answers are not as easy as they may seem.

You may say that goal-line technology has been a success, and you’d be right. But rolling the technology out into other areas of the game may not be that practical. In the case of deciding when a goal has been scored or not, there is no middle ground, no grey area. Either the whole of the ball has crossed the goal-line, or it hasn’t, and we now have computer technology and graphics to give us the answers we’re looking for.

That however is not going to be easy to replicate in other facets of the game. Take penalties for instance. When is a foul inside the box not a foul inside the box? How much contact is enough contact to warrant a foul? When is a dive not a dive? What is the line between contact that warrants a foul, and an act of simulation?

Sure, there are incidences when penalties are given when they clearly shouldn’t have, and vice versa, but the issue of fouls and penalties can be highly interpretational, and in a lot of incidences (possibly the vast majority of cases), whether you think a penalty should be given or not often depends on which team you happen to be supporting.

No amount of computer graphics and lines can change this, so when we talk about introducing technology in this area, what we are really talking about is introducing a television match official (TMO), similar to that used in rugby, being called on to make the decision. As the issue of penalties can be open to a high degree of interpretation, all we are talking about is a judgement call being made by the TMO, rather than the referee.

Will that really mean more correct decisions? Will managers simply clog up their interviews with criticisms of the TMO rather than the referee whenever their team loses? It would be a similar story with red cards as well (what is the line between excessive force in the tackle and reasonable force in the tackle?). There are too many grey areas in these facets of the game to mean easy use of technology.

There is enough to talk about on this subject to fill a book. This article is not here to say that football shouldn’t adopt more technology, rather that there are no easy answers, and it is not as simple as it may first appear. Goal-line technology worked because it gave an immediate answer to a question in which there was no middle-ground, something that is much harder to replicate in other areas of football. Clearly this issue will rumble on, and the debates will continue to rage.

So what do you think?