Or, A Post Kind of Like The Last One, With Different Words

“The losers owe their loss to him and the winners triumph in spite of him. Scapegoat for every error, cause of every misfortune, the fans would have to invent him if he didn’t already exist. The more they hate him, the more they need him.”

- Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun and Shadow

Referees lie at the center of the game’s most cruel paradoxes. They are the only true gods of the field. And they get harassed like goobers. They exist to uphold justice. And they get booed like villains. This is true in almost any sport. But soccer refs get unusually harsh treatment. In a Times Online article, one of the more poignant pieces written this past week amidst grapeshot attacks on referees around the soccer world, Simon Barnes describes how “It’s simply not in football’s nature to respect referees.” He puts refs under the same category of ‘necessary evils’ as taxation and traffic cops. We need them, but ideally they wouldn’t exist. Barnes implies that we don’t need to respect refs, just accept them and the imperfect reality they represent. I agree, sort of.

While Barnes touches on the central paradox of the refs’ place in sports, which Eduardo Galeano nails in a vignette in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, dismissing these brave soul as “unrespectable” provides too black and white a framework to gain a sensitive understanding of their place in the game. ‘Necessary evils’ shouldn’t be dismissed or simply accepted, but understood and harassed and improved. As we might care about the way government spends our taxes, we need to examine the way refs impose their powers. In addition to considering referees buffoons, we need to consider how we might, in a more perfect world, respect their work. In other words, we don’t need to respect them, but we need to understand how we could. This might seem like a meaningless or nitpicky distinction, and maybe it is. But I believe it’s crucial to the integrity and force of the game.

Too often refs bear the blame, from players and coaches and fans, for clubs’ failings. They also too often get granted immunity, from the organizations and associations that employ them. Both sides are equally right and wrong. As Galeano says, refs get treated unfairly as the “scapegoat for every error.” But they do decide games. They award decisive penalties and free kicks. They waive off goals. Their whistles collide with the game’s weather patterns to create fateful winds that can upend a ship or carry it to safety. Although refs can act like “outsiders” to the natural rhythms of the game, like Simon Barnes suggests, they are just as embroiled in the drama as the players, and sometimes just as responsible for the way it plays out. They try their best to preserve the game’s natural rhythm, but they also have a duty to control that rhythm, which in ref-speak involves “feeling the game” and “pulling in the reigns” if it threatens chaos. The main problem for the ref is that, in soccer, determining the right decision, or the right pull of the reigns so to speak, can be next to impossible. Everybody, from players to managers to fans, knows this – even if they refuse to admit it to protect their own biases or the sanctity of the game in which they invest so much. As Fredorrarci made me believe in a recent post on The Run of Play, justice loses its clarity in an environment that encourages players to do anything to survive, to claim cheating honorable. Players will seek any advantage that the laws of the game allow. They cheat. They dive. They deceive. And all the while they scream bloody righteousness. The ref, meanwhile, tries to cling to some higher ideal of Justice by enforcing the Laws of The Game, which in theory exist to let the players determine the game’s result. But when players willfully undermine these laws, the ref has the impossible duty of damage control, of separating cheating from cheating more, false from falser.

If refs don’t deserve our respect, they at least deserve our pity. But we don’t see much of this either. The only thing we hate more than the cheating player is the ref who allows the player to cheat, the one who misses the call. “Why can’t they see what we see?” we wonder in smug congratulation of our keen observatory skills, watching a botched offside call from a birds-eye view in our recliners, or rewinding a slow-motion replay of Fletcher’s leg bending like a proboscis to nectar around Fabregas’ knee. We swear and shake our heads and blame the ref for “ruining the game.” And he does, in that he fails to uphold the rules.

At the same time, though, the ref’s fallibility springs from the purity of the same game he supposedly tarnishes. Namely, the dramatic heart of soccer depends on the mysteriousness of its own laws. A ninety-minute passion play, the game runs via rules that reasonable men consistently interpret in contradictory ways, even if they’re sitting in the same bar watching the same replay and wearing the same jersey. This drives the bloodletting tensions of the sport. Many sports suffer from such uncertainty, but soccer’s low score-line and harsh penalties lend immense weight to ref’s decisions. Games can, and often do, come down to one soul-crushing call. This happens in sports like basketball and baseball too, but a few extra free throws or an extra strike call seem inconsequential when compared to a game-deciding penalty kick. And one could easily argue that soccer’s rulebook leaves more up to interpretation than any other sport. Its language invites uncertainty. Did the hand “move toward the ball” or the “ball toward hand?” Did the attacking player “interfere with the play” or “gain an advantage” enough to be called offside? Did the player make an “attempt to play the ball?”

The deep-running uncertainties of the game buoy the central arguments both for and against using technology to aid refs in their decisions. Instant replay, which would allow refs the same birds-eye view we’re afforded on our couches, would undoubtedly correct some bad calls. That it could do so in a relative instant, with one quick look at a monitor – at least regarding offside calls – gives it wide appeal. But using replays would also magnify the game’s indeterminate core. Take the Chelsea-Barcelona second leg alone as a model. Would seeing instant replays help you call a handball on Eto’o? On Pique? Was either intentional? Does it depend on the circumstance of the game, the nature of the singular game under scrutiny? Do you want refs to stop the game while vacillating over replays to make an ultimately arbitrary decision that they made adamantly within the run of play?

Preserving the game’s flow seems as true to the game’s laws as getting the laws right. In the spirit of the game, we want the players, and the ref, to determine results on the field and in the fervor of the moment and not after-the-fact. And so we accept the natural human fallibility of the game – that refs make false decisions, and also that players’ duplicities con refs into making false decisions. The weakness of the game’s rules lets actors rule the game. If players are savvy enough actors to fool the refs then more power to them. When refs pretend that they know the call then they have a much tougher audience to fool: everyone else.

The game’s flaws give it an overwhelming humanity that creates real drama. It gives us entertaining battles between cowardice and bravery, villainy and heroics, ignorance and insight, and everything in between. Tangled inextricably in this drama, the ref is somewhere between an actor and a director. He is the head stagehand for a performance that he doesn’t know. The sport benefits immensely from those refs best able to interpret the drama as it unfolds, to untangle the game’s angles in a way that gets them wrong the least. The best refs are the ones that truly let the players win or lose, the ones who erect the lights and walls in the right places, to let the players express themselves in the cleanest and most uninhibited way.

Maybe I’ve been hoaxed by the media or I haven’t been around long enough, but it seems like refs have been getting more criticism this year than I ever remember from players, coaches and fans alike. Are the voices simply louder now? Or is it possible that a rift has developed between the development of top class players and the development of top class refs? Maybe it was always there. Refs always sucked, and always will suck. Or maybe developing top class refs has proved a more difficult process than we’ve ever cared to admit given the resources and the measurements of success we currently use.

I don’t know how rigorously FIFA and other associations train referees, but we need to set standards that compare more favorably with those required to play professional soccer. Soccer’s governing bodies should poor money into referee development like they do into player development. And refs should make millions more than they do now if they can prove the worthiness of their performances by measurable standards like post-game video reviews (when possible). This is problematic both because of the slippery rules of the game and because few people want to go into officiating. Simply, the job just seems like a bitch. Simon Barnes is probably right that we will never truly respect or cheer refs, but we need to try to make them more respectable. Otherwise the game that we love will lose a crucial element of believability and meaning at the most competitive level. We don’t necessarily need to believe the ref, but we should believe in his purpose. We don’t need to respect the ref personally, but we need to respect his job.

How? We need to make the job more respectable, however possible. For starters, by using better training standards. Refs should have the eyesight of fighter pilots. They should have the fitness of marathoners. They should be much younger, on average, then they are now. And lets not stop there if we want to be serious about this. Refs should receive rigorous training in physics, physiology, and psychology so they can better tell the difference between a dive and a foul, hear the difference between cleat-ball and cleat-shin. Linesmen should have advanced conceptions of time and space so that they have the ability to see two events happening simultaneously and forty yards apart from one another – the ball getting struck and a striker darting behind an offside trap.

I’m only half kidding. If refs deserve to play on the same field as world-class athletic specimens then their performances deserve to be held to the same rigorous standards. Where are these standards? Who is setting them? Where are the computer programs that can set the curve for humans to outdo? We have turned star athletes into superheroes, who can dodge and dive so quickly and skillfully that slow-motion cameras can’t catch them. Now how can we create better superheroes, or supervillains, to police them?

At the same time, this won’t help at all. Creating better refs, even half-cyborgs with radar-enhanced-zoom-lenses for eyes, won’t save them from the limitations and blame that they have always faced. While we still have human referees acting in the topsy-turvy drama that is soccer, and I hope we always do, then we can only try to understand them as men, as humans performing an impossible task. We should make it a civic duty to pay attention to refs’ performances, to criticize their failures but also to praise their best moments, giving them the feedback necessary to improve, to stay modest. Media and leagues do this, but not enough. Too often leagues defend their employees while everyone else lashes them. Lets try to gain a mutual understanding of the issues, about which we all have biases. For me, when a ref lets play carry on after a dive we should all raise our glasses, kiss the screen, and voice our pleasure with this adroit fellow all over Referee Rating websites. Just like when we see a player shrug off a tackle that he could have easily leveraged into a free kick. These are true acts of heroism.

They might never happen in the same game. But I hope. I hope. And when they do please wake me up so I can pay my respects.◊

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