Thanks George for the email...it's a great read and puts into perspective what many of them go thru.
Soccer's eternal bête noir
Twelve Spanish referees talk to John Carlin about what drives them, their fears and their love of the job
El Pais Spain | John Carlin
It is a wintry Saturday evening. Dusk falls on Sant Cugat Sesgarrigues, a village of 800 souls in Barcelona province. But the scene repeats itself all over the country at this hour of day around this time of year. Deserted streets, cloaked in deathly silence... except on the outskirts of town, where the darkness is pierced by a ghostly light and the stillness, punctuated by scattered hollering. A soccer game rages on a dirt field. The local team is playing Masquefa Soccer Club, the sixth against the second seed in a Penedesca League match, Group 11, Third Division. If it weren't for the fact that there are barely 60 people on the stands and not enough money for a linesman, everything else - the strips, the players' intense rivalry, their very attitude - might make you think it was a Champion's League game.
And no one is more serious and more impeccably turned out, than the referee. The players seem to respect him. When he blows the halftime whistle, two or three of them approach him and chat. But on the first of two rows of seats on one side of the field not everyone looks so pleased. Five 18-year-olds hurl insults at the referee: "You're terrible!" screams one of them. "Piece of shit!" adds another. "Son of a bitch!," chimes in a third, and they all laugh.
The referee's name is Julián Haro. He's 37 years old, blue-eyed and dons a small earring in his left ear. He has an open and animated countenance. "Yeah, I heard them," he says in the austere locker room where he changes after the game. "I always hear them. But I can't afford to pay any attention, because if I did I wouldn't be able to keep doing this." Haro has been reffing for 20 years. He estimates that he officiates 80 matches a year. Doesn't it kill him how unfair people are? "For me the hardest thing is when they insult you before you've even blown the starting whistle." And how often does that happen? "Fifteen out of every 20 games," he says.
With the possible exception of a soldier in an occupation army, there is no profession in which one has to put up with so much constant hostility from complete strangers. The only thing that unites - always and everywhere - fans from rival teams is their common loathing of the ref. When it comes to the referee, fans are free to insult. For the 90 minutes the game lasts, the rules of civilized life are put on hold and people behave with the ref in a way that would be considered unacceptable in real life. And today, in Spain, where arguing about referees is a sport that generates almost as much interest as soccer itself, they seem to be hated more than ever.
Why, then, are there 10,000 apparently sane Spaniards who have voluntarily decided to become referees? In what ways are they different from other mortals? What motivates them? How can they possibly survive in the ocean of insults and slander that defines a referee's reality?
The strangest part of all is that they love it. I interviewed a dozen refs, from the most seasoned First Division veterans to a teenager who officiates children's games and, far from being frustrated soccer players, they are crazy about their profession. And they love to talk about it, especially about the hardships they suffer.
They talk about the loneliness of the referee. "If you're a player and you've had a bad game, the team cheers you up," says Antonio Llonch Andreu, who has retired after 24 years in the First Division. "If you're a ref and you've had a bad game, you're on your own."
About the inevitability of making mistakes in every game. "We know we're going to make mistakes," says Eduardo Iturralde, who reffed the last Real Madrid-Barcelona match at Bernabéu Stadium and has been working in the First Division for 11 years. "I tell my linesmen before the games: We're going to make mistakes, but let's try and make as few as possible."
About people's inability to understand the pressure they're under. "We have to make decisions on the spot, with the enormous pressure of knowing that millions of people are watching us," says Ignacio Fernández Hinojosa, a much-admired ref who retired from Second Division last season. "On the other hand, people watch replays of the controversial decisions over and over on television, and even though they're relaxed, sitting in some bar or in their living room, even then they don't agree. You'd think people would support us more. That they'd realize that 90 percent of the calls we make are accurate. But no. People only care about the other 10 percent..."
About having to live with the fact that fans think that the ref is at once God and the Devil, both judge and criminal. These two notions coexist in the minds of people who, outside the stadium, might be perfectly sane and coherent. This explains their surprise and outrage every time the ref is wrong - or they think he's wrong. "People have to realize that we're only human," complains Iturralde.
About the constant suspicion that they favor one team over another, or that they have been bought off. "No referee goes out on the field with the idea of favoring anybody," says Hinojosa. "When people criticize our reffing that's something we've got to accept; but when they accuse you of favoritism, it's terrible," says Llonch Andreu.
About accepting that the referee's role is, by definition, that of the bad guy in the movie. "With top-class athletes, the good moments are always remembered and the bad ones, forgotten; with referees it's the other way around," says Iturralde. And that's because in soccer mythology, the players are the heroes, and the refs the anti-heroes. And so, people look for good qualities in the players and faults in the referees to reinforce these prejudices. "It's sad," says Iturralde, "but true."
But that sadness doesn't deter referees; in fact, they almost seem to feed off it. "I'll never be able to give back to soccer what it has given me," says Iturralde, who at 38 has been reffing since he was 14. "It's made me grow as a person."
What does soccer give referees? What is there about the job that makes up for the sadness, the loneliness, the injustice, the pressure, the harshness inherent to it? The easy answer is that they like to suffer. The more complex one is that referees have found in what they do something that everyone looks for in life: power, money, passion.
"The referee is one of the figures of the game, as essential as the ball, and whether or not he likes to admit it, he likes that," says García de Loza, who worked in the First Division for 14 years. Dani Capel, who is 19 years old and has been reffing for the Barcelona youth leagues for two, takes his job equally seriously: "When you go out on the field," he says, "and you know you have a huge responsibility. You feel important."
But in the next one and a half hours the fans, and in some cases the players, do everything in their power to make them feel less important. But here is where another form of vanity comes into play. The vanity of the martyr. Of one who jumps into the lion's den without blinking, knowing his cause is a just one.
"Refs must be very strong, have lots of character," says García de Loza. "How they respond to pressure is what sets a good referee apart from a bad referee." Jaime Reverté, of the Referee Association of Catalonia, calculates that 20 percent give up after the first two years. "In the end, reffing is personality," says Reverté. After refereeing for 14 years, for the last nine he's been teaching aspiring young refs. "You might know the rules backwards and forwards and not be a good ref; or, you might be not so great technically but superior on the field."
The ones who stick with it for decades feel some of this superiority. As García de Loza says, reffing a game "puts your personality to the test like nothing else." "You're alone in the world," adds Iturralde, "when you screw up in a Madrid-Barcelona game, millions of people see you. It's not like screwing up in a regular job. If an office worker makes a mistake, at worst their boss will see it."
It helps that First Division refs are very well-paid, even if for most it's their second job. They earn €84,000 a year for officiating two matches a month. Second Division refs get €36,000. And even on Julián Haro's level, what they receive is no pittance: around €180 per match, and Haro often refs two per weekend, which more than supplements his monthly salary as a truck driver.
But according to a study done two years ago by the Northumbria University, in the United Kingdom, referees deserve every cent they are paid, and more. Based on interviews with 42 high-level British judges, the study confirmed the self-complacency of the Spanish refs interviewed for this report. "Only individuals with the strongest of personalities can withstand the immense stress of refereeing," found Nick Neave, author of the study. "They are very upright, confident people who have developed very strong defense mechanisms. In psychological terms, they're very tough people." That toughness derives, in part, from a kind of madness. They suffer, according to Neave, from "illusory superiority." Everyone shows this condition to some extent, but with refs, it is what makes them uniquely suited to the job. That's why, says Neave, referees share many traits with soldiers, politicians and police officers.
This feeling that they are better than everyone else, however, can mean a tendency to be overly authoritarian. And not all refs think that authoritarianism is the best way to achieve the desired results. This question is at the heart of an eternal debate: in refereeing, what is more effective, dialogue or authoritarianism? Surprisingly, though many Spanish refs are known for being authoritarian - they tend to show red and yellow cards more often then their European colleagues - many agree that persuasion is better than threats.
Llonch Andreu, for instance, analyzes one First Division match this season, in which the ref gave a player a yellow card in the first minute. "The tackle was ugly, but not ugly enough to leave the ref without any options. The problem is, if you pull out the yellow card that early, you'll be forced to give out many more. If not, the players will start accusing you of being biased. You won't have any elbow room. The ref thinks he's being brave, but it's a false notion of bravery." Indeed, in that game the referee ended up handing out seven yellow cards and two reds. At the end of the game he was booed by the entire stadium and one of his red cards was later revoked by the Appeals Committee.
"What's a yellow card for?," asks García de Loza. "It's to tell the player watch out, you can't cross this line, and if you do I've got to give you a red card. Now, a more confident referee would give the player a warning before showing a yellow card. That gives you more leeway, and the player will listen to you and respect you more, because he'll see you're a ref with personality." So giving out cards right away is a sign of weakness? "Exactly. The referee must always show the player who's boss. But if he gives a yellow card for some stupid thing, he risks losing control. Because over the course of 90 minutes he'll have 20 tackles like that one."
For Llonch Andreu, the difference between a good ref and a great ref is not so much how he takes the pressure, but the instinct he has for soccer, beyond the rules. "A good ref goes by the rules. A great ref understands that the wonderful thing about the rules is that they allow you to use your judgment. And that's something you develop by learning to read the game, its particular rhythm and mood. If on top of that you know how to listen to the players and talk to them, there's less tension, more respect, more credibility." Continues Andreu: "The players become allies, and the game goes smoothly without you becoming the protagonist. This is something I've learned over time. At the beginning I was one of the refs who gave out the most cards, at the end, the least. I got better! I could feel I had more control, I saw how I earned the respect of the players, and even the fans. Little by little, I adapted to the English style of reffing, which is the best. The English know better than anyone that you control the match better when cards are the last resort."
Much of the criticism of Spanish refs is based on an unfavorable comparison with their English counterparts. Iturralde understands this, but doesn't agree: "I admire English soccer. We have the British to thank not only for inventing the sport, but also for keeping the spirit of the game alive. I wish we could ref like they do, but we can't, because here the spirit is very different. They're two different cultures." Two cultures? "The players and the press are different. The press in England doesn't spend all their time before a game reminding everyone what the ref did in the last game, or that 10 years ago when the same two teams played he didn't call a penalty... As for the players, the English are willing to talk; Spaniards aren't. English players don't try to pull any tricks. When they're on the ground it's because they're hurt. In Spain, like in Italy and Portugal, if they're on the ground you don't know what to think."
The only ones they can trust are their colleagues. This is where the love factor comes in. All the refs interviewed spoke highly of their experience in the refereeing world. According to Ignacio Fernández Hinojosa, from the time they start out, refs develop tight bonds with their colleagues. "We're very isolated, both on the field as well as in the world of soccer. We only have each other, and very close friendships are formed." Like soldiers on the front? "Yeah. Everyone attacks us and that unites us. I'm sure there's more comradeship among refs than among players."
Only a ref can compensate for the loneliness of another ref, says Llonch Andreu: "Refereeing is a way of life. We've got things in common, we have a perspective that no non-ref has," says Dani. He's crazy about reffing. During the day, he works as a bookkeeper; but from six to 10 every night, you can find him at the Referee Association, where he teaches, revises minutes, prepares games... And on weekends, he goes to see three or four other lower-level matches. All voluntarily. For the love of his calling.
This is where you can see the difference between referees and other mortals. How many soccer fans would ever think that being a ref - the scapegoat that everyone hates - is something desirable? None of them. But for young people who want to devote their lives to this, First Division refs are not hated, but, as Reverté says, worshipped as gods. "They're our idols. Here, the kids react like other kids do when they see the players. They ask for their autographs." This confirms Reverté's assertion that "only a ref understands a ref." Only a ref can understand the fascination of the job. Haro, who the morning after the game in Sant Cugat Sesgarrigues was going to drive two hours to officiate another game in Perelada (Gerona), admits that, after 20 years and around 1,600 games under his belt, in Third Territorial Division or below, for him it's a real "vice."
http://www.elpais.es© 2006 El Pais
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Topic: Thoughts of a ref at the highest level (Read 351 times)