Our experts debate whether Premier League referees need more help with crucial decisions during matches.
Ronald Koeman did not quite get the credit he deserved. Just a few minutes previously, the Southampton manager had seen his side lose to Liverpool, ceding ground in the achingly tight race for a Champions League spot. There had been a quite brilliant goal from Philippe Coutinho and a quite fortuitous one from Raheem Sterling.
There had also been three penalty claims — one decent, one reasonable, one very strong — for the Dutchman’s team. Two had come in the first four minutes, a few seconds before and after Coutinho gave the visitors the lead. On another day, too, Liverpool might have had their goalkeeper sent off.
It is fair to assume that Koeman was livid with Kevin Friend, the man who had refereed the game and who had, to put it kindly, not had the sort of afternoon he will want to watch back on DVD.
In such circumstances, most of his peers in the Premier League would have done one thing and one thing alone. They would have offered a withering critique of the referee’s performance. They might have suggested they would be writing to Mike Riley, the generalissimo of the whistle-blowing world, to express their discontent.
Koeman resisted these temptations. Instead, he spiked the controversy. “Humans,” he said, “make mistakes.” That was it. He admitted he was disappointed with one of the penalty decisions, not all three, and talked instead about his team’s failings: their toothlessness in front of goal, their lack of confidence, their lack of guile. It was such an unusual occurrence that it was quite striking.
In the last however many years — could be 10, could be 20, it’s hard to say — football has become increasingly obsessed with the man in the middle. It is an article of faith for many now that not only are games just as likely to be won and lost by referees as they are by players, but that officials are getting worse. Standards are slipping. It is almost universally accepted. But then a lot of universally accepted things are nonsense, and this is no different.
Instead of things getting worse, there is an optical illusion at play here. It is best expressed as an equation. There are more football matches on television now than ever before. There are more cameras at each of those games, many of them functioning in slow motion. There are more pundits watching those cameras, each of them analysing the game’s key incidents, and more people writing about what happened.
Southampton manager Ronald Koeman expresses his displeasure with referee Kevin Friend and believes Saints midfielder Filip Djuricic was fouled in the area by Joe Allen.
More games are seen in more granular detail than ever before. And that means that you better see the beauty but that you cannot help spotting the flaws. Do referees make more mistakes now, or do we just have more opportunity to see them making mistakes? The equation: Games + (Cameras x Pundits) = more chance to see where the referee got it wrong. It looks like things are getting worse. The likelihood is that they are not, though some might point out that the pace of the modern game perhaps has made the referee’s job a bit more challenging.
As John Henry, Liverpool’s owner, once pointed out, referees in the Premier League get 95 percent of their decisions right. Ninety-five percent of the time, if it was not given as a penalty, it was not a penalty. Ninety-five percent of the time, that was a red card. It is a pretty consistent figure, and it is a pretty good hit rate. It is not, though, quite good enough, because referees are paid to get as much of the 5 per cent right as they can.
It is that 5 percent — the tight ones, the debatable ones, the “seen them given” ones — that referees are paid to get right. It is that 5 percent that wins titles and decides relegation and claims or costs people jobs. Most of us would get the easy ones right. It is on the close calls that referees earn their corn. And it is the close calls that, at the moment, they seem to be getting wrong.
Acres of webpages and hours of airtime have been given to debating how to help referees get more of that 5 per cent right. The first suggestion is always “technology.” Technology, the thinking goes, will sort it all out, whether it is a man with a television screen (1950s technology) or a sentient robot with a whistle (2050s technology combined with 1850s technology).
Alas, this is not quite true. As Koeman noted, in two of the three cases at Southampton, a video official would not have been able to make a clear-cut decision any more easily than his colleague on the pitch. A lot of the most controversial decisions are, to some extent, subjective. Was Dejan Lovren’s handball a penalty, or was his hand in a natural position, and therefore not committing a foul? Dealer’s choice, really. A video referee does not spare the debate there. He just shares the blame.
Then there is that other common suggestion, that referees would soon buck their ideas up if they had to explain their decisions in post-match interviews, a sort of sweaty governmental enquiry mixed with a good old-fashioned public shaming.
I can save you time on that one. They gave that penalty/that red card/that throw-in because that is what they thought happened at the time. That is the answer to every single one of the questions people are so desperate for them be asked: they thought they were right. What else would they say? “Andre, why did you send him off?” “I just thought it would be funny, Clive. Because I hate Queens Park Rangers.”
If all this sounds flippant, it is not meant to. Yes, personally, I think referees are just as good/bad/mediocre as they have always been. To quote Koeman once more, this is something that everyone in every country has always believed: that referees are not what they used to be. It is in the same category as the feeling that summers always used to be hotter or chocolate bars bigger.
But then it is, obviously, hugely important that they get as many of those 5 percent of decisions correct as possible. Whatever help they can be given should be given. The game’s authorities should introduce some form of technology — certainly for contentious offsides — because not doing so is deeply, oddly reactionary.
They are not the only ones who might need to introduce change, though. It is time that we, too, did our bit. Many of the errors being made this season, and in recent ones, seem to be of a specific nature. It is not that referees are giving the wrong decisions. It is that they are not making decisions. Clearly it is easier not to award a penalty than it is to do so if you are unsure. The chances are that the team who might have had a penalty but did not will feel less aggrieved than the team who conceded a penalty when they should not.
It is inconceivable that this is not directly related to the scrutiny officials are now under. It is beyond likely that they are under such pressure — from managers talking about them in news conferences to journalists writing about them and pundits analysing them — that they are taking, consciously or not, the safest possible route. They are avoiding risk. For that to stop, we have to heed Koeman’s words, and remember that they are, indeed, only human.
Rory Smith is a columnist for ESPN FC and The Times. Follow him on Twitter @RorySmithTimes.