Missing, presumed dead - Fair Play

Game 46, 2017-18

The home team in this boys' U17 game is bottom of the league with six points, and bottom of the Fair Play table with many more. The two often go hand in hand - the team currently at the top of this league is also first in Fair Play. There are obvious reasons why a well-disciplined XI performs better on the field.

Slogans with good intentions -
but they change fuck all.

I talk to the home side's coach before the game. He explains that he only took the team over two weeks ago, and is preparing them already for next season. "Things have been a bit chaotic," he says. And when the game starts, you can see why a change of coach was necessary. Their understanding of the offside law is non-existent, and their position in the Fair Play standings truly reflects their sourpuss, foul-based approach to football. Again, what a privilege to referee such a game for €14.

Stormy skies, multiple reds and murder

Games 44-45, 2017-18

It's quiet and sultry in the park, with death and distant storms in the air. Two teams of men lazily warm themselves up for the 1pm kick-off. Four days earlier, just a few hundred yards from where we're about to play sport, a dog-walker found the body of a 29-year-old woman. Life must go on, though - this end-of-season dead rubber at the middle to lower end of the city's bottom league abjures all musings on mortality. After all, there's 13th place to defend.

"But ref, I was trying to play the ball!"

It doesn't take long for the afternoon to plummet from meaningless kick-about to a prolonged and rabid expression of collective outrage. It's all my fault, of course, when in the ninth minute an away defender chooses to upend the home team's forward, who's through on goal in the penalty area and about to shoot. It was I who personally wrote the rules saying that the denial of a clear goal-scoring opportunity is a red card offence. And no, there was no attempt at all to play the ball, which was far beyond the lugging defender's reach. It was a cynical, calculated trip.

The red-carded player and his team-mates all surround me, shouting and gesticulating...

"We could either be nutters, or a club where you can bring the family"

Game 43, 2017-18

Just over a year I wrote about a game where I red-carded three players from the away team on a particularly hostile afternoon, even by the standards of this region’s amateur leagues. Last October I reffed them again, with barely a problem aside from one yellow card for dissent. Yet while they had become more sanguine, they had crashed to the bottom of the league, having no points from 13 games, with an impressive Goals Against tally of 106.

Time for a change.

This past Sunday I was assigned to ref  them once more, on a well-kempt grass field surrounded by four steps of terracing. A beautiful little football ground on a stunning afternoon. Meanwhile, the team has undergone its second complete transformation in just over a year. They’re good again (having soared up to second from bottom with 21 points), but still calm. “They’ve got eight new players,” the opposition’s low-key coach tells me before the game, resigned to the fact that his side is meeting them just at the wrong time – as they're hitting form.

Video evidence should prompt reform of the offside law

I once wrote a short story narrated by a linesman who disallows the best goal of all time. It's a slick, 33-pass move, followed by a mazy, Messiesque dribble, then an audacious cross that ends with a spectacular, Ronaldoesque overhead kick. The linesman flags for offside, and the TV replays prove him correct. But only by a negligible margin of an inch or two. His decision is spot on, according to the rules, but he's globally vilified for being the man who cancels out what is inarguably the most brilliant move in the history of football. 

Lines the linesman cannot
see. Do we need them?

This story rolled around my head and was forgotten long before the introduction of video evidence, but now its moral again seems pertinent. In the Bundesliga this season, goals have been celebrated by fans, only for their joy to be annulled minutes later by a cold, factual look at the video evidence. Most famously, Cologne's very late 'winner' against Hanover was (correctly) overturned for offside by the video referee, while an earlier incident when a Cologne player was erroneously called offside in a goal-scoring position was ignored - presumably because it would have been impossible to bring play back (one of many flaws in the video evidence system). 

A weekend of strikes, anger and disappointment

Games 40-42, 2017-18

After more than a month off refereeing due to a combination of bad weather, illness and holidays, I was set to return to the field this weekend. Then my refereeing body called us out on strike (youth games only) to protest a physical attack last week against one of our members during a boys' U17 game. Nonetheless, I was still in charge of four games this weekend, one way or another, and all of them reflected to varying degrees the still toxic football atmosphere in my city.

The time has come...

I supported the strike and the reasons for it, even though the action was not even discussed (let alone voted on), as it should have been, at our monthly referees' meeting last Tuesday. Not all referees  supported strike action, but you had no choice - if you'd been assigned to a youth game, you were now automatically withdrawn.

On Friday evening, before the strike has started, I ref a boys' U17 game. The home coach introduces herself to me one minute before kick-off, just as she's bringing her team back in from warming up. "Kick-off's at six," I say, pointing out that the away team is already out and ready. She shrugs. I add that I have plans tonight, looking at my watch, but I might as well have been reading her the Confucian Classics in their original Chinese. We kick off eight minutes late.

At half-time, though, she's much keener to talk, appearing at my changing room door with her team 0-3 down. "You need to watch out for offside," is her opening line, with courtesy still far from being her strongest point...

The problem with teenage boys...

Game 39, 2017-18

When I was a young father people used to look at my daughters and ask me, “Don’t you ever wish you’d had a boy?” I used to reply with a short and truthful “No,” while resisting the urge to tell them to shut the fuck up insulting my children by implying that they’re the wrong sex.

Pelé and Garrincha - you have to
 be about this good to skip training.

“Well, wait until they’re teenagers,” these fatbergs of wisdom would knowingly fart on. “Then you’ll wish you’d had boys.” It turned out they were wrong again. And having coached and refereed teenage players of both genders, and having once been a teenage boy myself, I can only feel grateful for having avoided living with these fluid-shipping, hormonal wrecking balls masquerading as the Lord of the Big Fucking Cock. 

On Friday I tell three players on my U15 team they can’t play at the weekend because they missed both training sessions last week, and didn't take the trouble to let me know why. One immediately texts and says he is sorry, but he’d been injured. The second eventually calls and sort of apologises. The third one writes in the team’s WhatsApp group that we will surely lose because now “shit players” are getting picked ahead of him, the standby Garrincha...

Why do I referee?

Refereeing at the amateur level is a barely compensated activity that affords us much loud and personal abuse, and often provokes the question among friends, relatives and neutrals: "Why in the name of all that's profane do you spend your weekend doing that?" I have no idea, is my stock response. Joking aside, though, I really have no idea. That is, when I look at it dispassionately sitting safely at my computer terminal. In reality, I'm no closer to giving up than I was the day that I started nine years ago. 

This week I was interviewed on a number of football-related topics by Mike Woitalla of Soccer America, who asked me about the difference between refereeing in Germany and the US, my favourite idea for a change to the Laws of the Game, and why I referee at all.

SOCCER AMERICA: You've been living in Germany now for three years after living 16 years in Washington, D.C. Anything you miss about American soccer -- as a writer, fan, coach, referee or soccer parent?

As a referee and coach, I miss the generally calmer atmosphere of U.S. youth soccer. In Germany, it's always intense, at times intimidating, and occasionally downright violent -- in both youth and adult soccer. I'm trying to inculcate the importance of sporting values to my boys' U-15 team -- getting them to stay calm when fouled, or to shake the ref's hand at the end of the game, for example. It's a more or less permanent struggle. In my first year as a referee here, I almost quit several times. Now I've developed a very thick skin and write a blog to offload and have found that's really helped, but the change was a huge culture shock for me.

SA: If you could change a rule in soccer, what would it be?

Ten-minute time penalties for dissent. At the moment, the rule is a yellow card for "dissent by word or action," but it's only enforced in the most extreme cases. If I cautioned every case of dissent in my German amateur league games the field would be deserted after 30 minutes. I'd love to see referees respected as they are in rugby -- a single word to the ref and you're out to the sin-bin. If rugby players can do it, soccer players can learn it too.

SA: Why did you start refereeing and why do you continue?

For one season, my eldest daughter was on a travel team in the U.S. (she hated it and went back to rec) and they needed parents to train as assistant referees, so I volunteered. I was assigned to a tournament and really enjoyed it, so I straightaway trained to become a center ref too, and quickly realized that after more than 35 years as a player I didn't know half of the Laws of the Game (like most players). Despite the abuse, I'm in my 10th year of refereeing, and I keep doing it because I love being out on the soccer field -- most days, it's where I feel like I belong, where I'm happiest.

Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022. 

The fusion of Reason (the referee) and Emotion (the player)

Game 38, 2017-18

Let's say that in theory the referee represents Reason, and that the players represent Emotion. The (uncorrupted) referee has no interest in the outcome of any given game, as it's their job to rationally and neutrally implement the rules.

Meanwhile, the players have only two goals in mind - the success of themselves and their team. The desire to score and win is driven by feelings of loyalty and ambition. Anything that thwarts that ambition provokes frustration and even anger (I know this because I played for 40 years).

"Hey, Roald, lend the
ref yer coat, will ya?"

A referee must accept that, as the anchor of reason, they are going to come into conflict with the mental tipping point of performers who, in their dreams, imagine themselves as heroes, even if only for a few hours among a small group of people wearing the same coloured shirt. That's an integral part of the game. There are days, though, when the precarious balance between reason and emotion makes no sense at all. Days when I'm pushed to get emotional too.

On Saturday night it was colder than it's been all winter - minus 7 degrees, with that same persistently penetrative wind that's been chilling our fibres since the middle of last week. And yet again I had the immense privilege of refereeing a one-sided U19 boys friendly match for the vast reward of €14, while all sensible folk were huddled in front of the football highlights or drinking beer somewhere warm. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who didn't want to be there. That's just by way of background...

A nice sunset and a bog-standard shoving match

Game 37, 2017-18

Sometimes there's no story to tell, but at least there's a picture to show. What you do not sense from the photograph is the bone-cutting breeze that added an extra layer of chill to an already sub-zero evening. At half-time in this U19 friendly, the away coach - 4-1 down and with only ten starting players - made the case for a shortened second half. Neither I nor the home coach had any problem with that.

After another commendably discussion-free first half, the inevitable happened in the second - a couple of the away players started to get frustrated at the score-line and committed deliberate, niggly fouls. This eventually resulted in a shoving match between two opposing teenagers, and the old fart with the whistle intervened to sort things out. Stern lecture, two yellows - the usual. The rest of the evening passed without incident, and at the final whistle we all trotted off a little quicker than usual to the warmth of the changing rooms.

When I got home I watched the second half of Sevilla v Manchester United. Hard to say which of these two games was more forgettable.

Final score: 9-1 (3 x yellow)

Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022. 

A 'soft' foul in the penalty area is still a penalty kick

Game 36, 2017-18

"And don't talk back to the referee!" I hear the home trainer instructing his U17 side just as I open the door to my changing room to step out and start the match. Sound advice.

And they don't, at least not to start with. This is the same club I reffed at on Valentine's Day, and clearly one with a generally healthy sporting culture. The first half passes without any major incident - no goals, no bookings, in a game of few chances contested by two well-matched teams. There's not a single sigh of dissent at any of the multiple free-kicks I blow for. If this keeps up, I'm going to start seriously enjoying my part-time job.

Careful with those arms
in the penalty area... (pic: N Lotze).

The second half would have passed just as quietly, had it not been for the two penalties. Both are conceded by the home team, and can only be described as 'soft', but they are clear fouls, committed right in front of me. Both times, a defender throws an opponent to the ground - not violently, just lazily. The first as the ball's flying overhead from a cross, the second as two players tussle for the ball after a corner kick. 

I've written before about players protesting penalty calls on soft fouls. "How can you give a penalty for that?" And I've written before that I have a certain sympathy - the weak foul didn't earn the harsh punishment of a spot-kick. But even a stupid and unnecessary foul is a foul, and if it's in the penalty area, it's a penalty kick. Go sing your laments on a hill-side in Zürich, but short of abolishing the penalty kick, Fifa's not changing the law on this any time soon.

So, I tell them all to shut up and back off. Both penalties are converted. The home team never really looks like getting one back.