First, a disclaimer, of sorts. I am a passionate football fan-a fan of the game, having played at a high level, being a licenced coach and certified referee. I am also a near-lifelong Liverpool FC fan. My comments are made in the vein of the football fan, but it happens to be true that an issue has been sparked by Liverpool’s coach, Jurgen Klopp.
The truth is Klopp is one of many managers who are passionate on the sidelines and that sometimes boils over into confrontation with officials, to my mind simply because it’s they or players who need to correct something. The coach can deal with the players in many ways, but dealing with officials is limited, especially during matches. Looked at simply, what should one do when an apparent blatant transgression goes unpunished? Shrug the shoulders? Say “Well, that’s life.” Whatever indifferent reaction some may prefer, the reality is that decisions and match outcomes affect people’s livelihoods in significant ways. Fans can go and drink away their horrors, but a team that loses points when officials appear to have done a poor job can have players and coaches losing their jobs. It’s rare for officials to lose theirs.
That said, Klopp’s actions at the weekend: appearing to approach the 4th official in anger, though halted by a pulled muscle, and then saying after that he did not like what the centre referee said to him at the end of the match, has sparked reactions. One set has come from Refsupport, a UK charity giving support to referees.
Martin Cassidy, CEO of Refsupport, has proposed the best way to deal with managers and coaches abusing match officials would be to deduct points from teams for such behaviour. He may be right, but would it be a good idea?
He did not go into how many points would be involved for any transgression, but one can see the bun fight at the season’s end if such deductions matter in terms of teams’ fortunes for the next season, literally, with relegations/promotions and with qualification for UEFA tournaments.
Other details were not given, but one can think of how any scale of deductions would be food for subsequent criticism. They could even lead to legal challenges. We saw a few weeks ago, how Juventus, having been deducted 15 points for transfer transgressions, were given back the points and suddenly the fortunes of many teams are affected as Juventus rose up the table.
What many have seen in recent years is not inappropriate behaviour by coaches and teams, in isolation. It has occurred with a backdrop of some poor officiating. In the recent era of VAR, we have also seen opportunities to correct certain match-changing decisions by a set of officials reviewing the on-field decisions. However, we have seen that this has resulted in a series of clear inconsistencies in how officials interpret football rules. A valid question, though, is how far can poor officiating justify angry reactions from coaches, players and fans? The answer to that is nuanced by the fact that refereeing bodies don’t appear ready to openly hold officials to account for clearly poor decisions. At least, that’s annoying to many.
Now, officials do not make the rules, they interpret them, and many are subjective, but the bodies that do (FIFA and IFAB, mainly) and offer ways to interpret them seem to have added more confusion than clarity. We now have a world of frustration often caused by officials making these subjective decisions. Some of these can be shown clearly to be wrong from any objective assessment. (Most recently, referee Tierney penalized Mo Salah for a foul, which the assistant referee closer to the incident did not flag, and which video evidence showed was clearly Salah BEING FOULED. That sort of egregious mistake feeds into teams’ frustration.)
But, if penalizing teams for their coaches and players behaviour seems right, does not giving teams (back) points for poor officiating make sense? It would if the referring bodies were to be completely frank about officals’ performances. (How would that work?) In the absence of that, what about the occasions when officials and their body (eg PGMOL) apologise to teams for bad or wrong decisions?
At least, that would have a semblance of symmetry that accepts that match outcomes depend on teams and officials.
Deducting points can be fraught with complications (as seen recently in Serie A and Juventus). But, if a punishment seems to fit a crime, should we not consider if other ‘crimes’ warrant similar treatment?
My full view is that football needs a bigger overhaul to deal with discipline. It has allowed petulance to be the norm for decades and now tries to reel back parts of that. Other sports stamped down on it decades ago. But, the ‘beautiful game’ has long felt that it has to be more free-for-all than controlled. Are we reaping the harvest sown long ago?
Jamaica: Political Economy 