Football acts like referees are the issue but they are just following the rules

Football seems to have a problem with referees. Barely a weekend goes by without someone – a manager, a player, a pundit – making it abundantly clear that many of those who officiate are (apparently) not very good at their jobs.

Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, for example, was furious with referee Michael Oliver for sending off Leandro Trossard during his side’s top-of-the-table clash with Manchester City on September 22. He described it as “really, really worrying” that referees were giving out cards for what Arteta seemed to regard as trivial offences.

In this case it was Oliver’s decision to award a yellow card to Trossard after the Belgian booted the ball away to stop City taking a quick free kick. On top of a yellow card Trossard had already earned for a foul earlier in the game, the second offence, bringing a second yellow card, added up to a red card, meaning Trossard had to be sent off. Arteta’s criticism came even though it’s crystal clear that such offences merit exactly the punishments that were being meted out.

The previous week, referee Anthony Taylor was the man in the firing line. He dished out 14 yellow cards (a premier league record) for a range of offences committed during the Chelsea v Bournemouth game on 14 September. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a whole host of self-appointed social media experts were quick to express their dissatisfaction with Taylor’s officiating. As a result, the Premier League is currently investigating a number of those social media posts for allegedly making threats against Taylor and his family.

A significant part of the story in both of these cases concerns dissent and player petulance. Taylor, in particular, wasn’t standing for any of that, yellow-carding four players for inappropriately chatting back to the referee and one for excessive celebrations following a goal.

The story, or so one of the narratives around poor referring would have it, is officials are being over-zealous. The players themselves seem to have no agency in this. It’s the referees that are the problem.

If football is going to stop looking like a game primed for spoilt, stroppy schoolboys, then it’s precisely that narrative that needs to change. As I argue in a new book on integrity and football, there are three dimensions to cases like these.

Firstly, players continue – again and again, and at all levels of the game – to think that verbally abusing the referee when they make decisions that the player doesn’t like is part and parcel of football. “Shithousery”, to use the contemporary parlance, is frequently seen as a virtue. It shouldn’t be. Players push and push the rules to their limits and yet when they are called out the instinct is often to whine and bleat about how unfair it all is.

Football doesn’t have to look far to see how this can be done differently. Rugby referees have broadly similar sets of tools at their disposal and yet rugby players treat officials very differently. Diving about to win a free kick, for example, is not just frowned upon in rugby union, players trying it on are openly ridiculed. There is certainly bad behaviour in rugby, but you only very rarely see any players disrespecting the officials.

One way of shifting the balance is by doing what Taylor did in the Chelsea v Bournemouth fixture, which is to pull players up immediately on what he saw as disrespectful behaviour. A few months of rugby-style refereeing and football will be much the better for it.

Secondly, fans need to understand not just how difficult a referee’s job is but also to appreciate that regardless of whether referees get decisions right or wrong they, the fans, need to deal with it. Abusing officials and players is now a depressingly predictable part of football’s story.

And, as the pleayers themselves will tell you, it’s not just the referees who are singled out for abuse. Research by Ofcom and the Alan Turing Institute in 2022 showed that, 34% of all tweets directed at Newcastle United defender Ciaran Clark in the first five months of the 2021-22 season were deemed “offensive” by OfCom. OfCom further claimed that an offensive tweet was sent to a premier league footballer once every four minutes across that same time period. Players getting things wrong is part and parcel of the game – verbally abusing them for it should not be.

Finally, the administrators have a role to play in pushing stakeholders (fans, players, analysts) to show just a bit more spine. The FA needs to come out and explain that football will no longer stand for many of the antics that we currently see on the field. At the beginning of 2023-24 referees started giving yellow cards when players kicked the ball away to stop free kicks being taken. The result was that players for the most part simply stopped doing it. Sadly, no one appeared to tell Trossard.

The FA has long argued that those within football need to show the game more respect. Yet the FA itself needs to show the backbone to stand up and defend, openly and forcefully, those who try to practically implement all these nice words.

Whether Michael Oliver and Anthony Taylor thought they were fighting for the game’s integrity is largely irrelevant. They were just doing their job by interpreting the rules as they saw them. But there is something about the reaction of players, fans and indeed the FA that says that too many people still don’t really get it. Integrity matters. And it really is about time that they all start to take it seriously.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Daniel Hough does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.