Paul Rouse: Why would you ever become a referee?
All alone in the middle: Referee Paul Tierney shows red card Arsenal's Rob Holding for a foul on Tottenham Hotspur's Son Heung-min during the Premier League match at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
There is a belief that runs wild across the sporting world. Indeed, there is a fair chance that you believe it too: it is that referees (or some referees) make decisions that are founded in a bias against the team that you support.
There are all manner of explanations set out to explain such biases: personal spleen, geographical allegiances, city versus country, rich versus poor, black versus white, personal gain, or just pure badness.
During matches, people scream all manner of insult at referees. This abuse is often unrelated to either rules or to reality. It is usually the product of watching the match through a prism in which the team you are supporting is the focus of everything you see.
In this cockeyed view of the world, all marginal calls are expected to fall your way. And when they don’t, it is the ones that you didn’t get that are privileged in the memory above those that did indeed go for you.
Time – and television replays, if it’s that kind of match – take the edge off the emotional reactions of a lot of people. They come to realise that most of the refereeing decisions as basically fair enough, within the boundaries of human nature. There is no point is saying that this brings absolute forgiveness for a mistaken decision that has proven decisive. That would be to push the point too far.
But, usually, when you step away from the heat of a match, you can more or less see that the referee was usually right.
Not everyone thinks like that, of course. That losing is an essential part of sport does not necessarily mean it is any easier to accept, especially when the stakes are seen to be high.
There are many who can walk away with grace after a defeat, but some defeats are just cruel and it’s easier to fashion a scapegoat rather than accept that you just weren’t good enough.
Referees offer ready-made scapegoats, not least because of the inevitable mistakes they will make during games. For example, an analysis of refereeing mistakes made in English Premier League soccer matches sets out the number of incorrect decisions made by officials in matches at between 5 and 6% of all decisions made.
That this now includes mistakes made by VAR shows, still more clearly, just how difficult it is to referee. Although, even if every supporter at a match accepted that a referee made only 6% of their decisions in error, they would be convinced that the bulk of that 6% (or even all of it) went against their particular team.
In Gaelic games this is the type of approach that has led to clubs and counties being adamant that they will never again play under one referee or another.
In all of this, it can be impossible to get some people to climb down off the wall of their certitude. In a way, it’s this type of madness that adds a lot of colour to sport. But it should also be pointed out that being certain about rules and the interpretation of rules in matches is often unsustainable. There are too many cases when what happens isn’t really clearcut.
It also ignores the fact that Gaelic games are essentially unrefereeable as currently legislated for. There are calls for the introduction of VAR and for a second ref to be on the field. But you could fill video booths and fields with the wisest, most emotionally intelligent men and women in the country, make them professional, allow only those with elite eyesight and elite fitness and honours degrees in Decision Science from Harvard, and the difference that it would make would be marginal.
It is not possible to referee to the rules now in football or hurling, rather the rules can only be used as broad suggestions. This is true for two related areas: the tackle and the steps rule.
In Gaelic football, for example, unless a player sets off down the field as if running from a fair with a stolen pig under his arm, they do not get called for steps.
In hurling, the tackling that is now commonplace in the madness of midfield, with second arms wrapped in and out, and bodies flying from everywhere, offers a whole suite of fouls to be blown.
But if you blow all the steps violations and if you referee contact to the very letter of the law, the game will be whistle after whistle after whistle. And the referee will get some fairly special abuse for that.
Colm Lyons got a lot of grief for the way he refereed Limerick and Clare in Ennis. In particular, the view was expressed that he was overwhelmed by the pressure of the occasion.
But did he not hugely contribute to what was an outstanding sporting occasion by the way he refereed the game? He could have spent the whole afternoon blowing the whistle, but he didn’t and the game was thrilling.
And did he not get an awful lot right in his decisions?
It is true that Gearóid Hegarty should not have been sent off and also you could go through the match and argue the toss on many calls and point out other mistakes, but – in the round – Colm Lyons added to the day and does not deserve the nonsense that has been spouted since Sunday.
That same day that Limerick played Clare in Ennis, Boston Celtics played the Milwaukee Bucks in a vital NBA match in Boston.
All through that game, the referees were repeatedly abused. This abuse centred on two basic areas: the tackle and the steps rule.
There were three professional referees on a small court and the right of appeal of teams who wished to challenge a decision in the game through use of video technology.
It made no difference to the view in Boston that the referees were them. That Boston were actually winning the matcb and ultimately won it with their slippers on in the end doesn’t seem to have mattered.
Were those referees still biased against Boston, as the Celtics fans believed, and, in general, are referees biased?
There are, indeed, examples in history of referees who have been biased for very particular reasons.
One such example is really straightforward to set out. It involves the very small number of referees across the history of sport who have taken bribes to ensure a particular result.
This has often, but of course, not always happened in tandem with gambling. And in our modern world, this is not necessarily about the result of a match. It cannot also be about whether a penalty is given. Or whether a team is leading at half time. Or whether a player is sent off or not. And on and on across the gross reality that almost every moment of modern sport has been reduced to a thing that can be packaged up and gambled on.
When there are large sums of money at issue, it is a basic truth that there are referees who have been bought. And there are also, no doubt, referees in various sports who themselves gamble.
But this example of referees corrupted by personal financial gain does not apply to most matches that are played. So the question stands, are referees who have not been bought or who are not in thrall to gambling nonetheless biased for some other reason? If it is not for money, are there social or cultural factors that lead referees into bias?
Universities across the world have undertaken studies on the refereeing of all manner of sports and there is now a significant and growing body of literature on their supposed biases.
Of course, anyone who has spent time in either universities or with academics will be unsurprised to learn that there is no clear answer to the question of bias in refereeing.
For example, over the past twenty years there are basketball studies that have demonstrated using data that there was clear evidence of bias in refereeing over at least four basic categories: In favour of the home team. In favour of a star player. In favour of a ‘big’ team. In favour of small players over taller ones, or vice versa.
But a more recent basketball study dating from 2018 claimed that there was no meaningful evidence of such bias at all. Indeed, referees were found to have applied the rules, allowing for human error and the vagaries of interpretation within rules that demand human intervention in real-time, again and again.
If truth be told, all of the studies had interesting things to say, but none were really persuasive; in essence, the evidence found was not overwhelming in any direction.
The thing is that disentangling hard evidence from a basketball match – or any competitive match – is no straightforward matter. Referees make judgement after judgement as they pass around the playing area and ascribing motivations or explanations for decisions and non-decisions is an extremely perilous undertaking. And this is before we even get into the glamorous world of “unconscious bias”!
There was one insistent question that came up again and again in reading these studies and in thinking about the way referees are treated: Why you would become a referee?
