All Things Sports

Hi guys, welcome back to All Things Sports! Today we are talking about referees, a controversial topic to say the least. No matter what your thoughts are on referees, you cannot deny their role in sport. Simply put, they make it all happen. They allow for competition to occur because they officiate in a non-biased manner. At least that’s what they are supposed to do. I am not going to allege anything, but, many times we see fans(like me) claim that the refs are biased. Sometimes, all the calls go one team or one person’s way(looking at you Tom Brady). Other times, there seems to be bad calls on both sides from a fan’s perspective. The debate about officiating and referees has always been there, highlighted by many controversial moments across all sports. Recently however, the debate has started to grow even more as fans are beginning to feel that referees are getting worse. This hasn’t been helped by high-profile mistakes that were later admitted by the refs themselves such as a poor call that resulted in a clean goal getting disallowed in Liverpool’s 2-1 loss to Tottenham in what figures to play a big role in the English Premier League Title Race. The referees admitted that they made a mistake because of a miscommunication. Today however, I want to spend some time talking about the referees themselves, not the calls that they make, but rather the abuse they suffer and the stresses of the jobs. 

Obviously when you are officiating major sports games such as NFL, NBA, EPL, or UCL games, there is going to be a spotlight on you. You have in your control a major game with major implications on the team’s results, season, future, and more. You also have in your control the hopes and dreams of many fans who are ready to blame you at a minute’s notice. That is just the external pressure that referees face. I haven’t even started talking about the job itself. Imagine putting yourself in what has already been established as a high pressure moment, having to know and manage all the rules of the game, keep up with a physically enduring game, judge situations perfectly, and deal with professional players that always think they are in the right and will argue to any lengths to prove it. 

Do you see how much opportunity there is to make mistakes? Do you see why being a referee is hard? I am not saying they are allowed to make a ton of mistakes, but when they do, they deserve a little credit. Again, does this mean I am saying I support calls like the one mentioned above or the infamous Nola No-Call? Absolutely not. But if a referee makes a mistake, that doesn’t mean he or she deserves to be berated or harassed because being a referee is hard and these people are humans too. The treatment of referees has to get better because there are too many stories of referees being sent death threats, insults, or having stadiums chant “Ref you suck?”, if not for anything but the mental health of a referee. Imagine you are trying to help the game you love proceed and the whole stadium is chanting that you suck or calling for your head. That’s brutal for the referees to take and the impact of this is that less people are willing to become referees, preventing us from seeing more of the sports that we love. Because whether you love them or hate them, we need to have referees in order to be able to have official sporting events. The reality is that they are as integral to the games as any other part and we need to treat them in a humane manner at the very least to keep them in the games. I am not saying you have to agree with their calls, I myself won’t on a lot of occasions. But if you see a call that you disagree with or one that is objectively bad, don’t start hurling insults from the stands berating them. Don’t start chants saying they suck when all they are trying to do is support the game that they love. It’s time we all be a little nicer to referees even if they break our hearts in games (I’m still mad about Jessie James 2017).