The Meridian view on grassroots referees: a game that abuses its officials will not have any
One in six youth matches now kicks off without a qualified referee, and the adults on the touchline are the reason
There is a particular sound that anyone who has stood on the touchline of an under-13s football match on a Sunday morning will recognise. It is not the sound of children playing. It is the sound of adults shouting at a teenager with a whistle. This weekend’s survey from the Referees’ Welfare Network, which found that one in six youth matches in England is now played without a qualified official, is the predictable consequence of that sound.
The arithmetic is stark. The game trains more referees every year than it did a decade ago, and loses nearly half of them before their second season. The most common reason they give is abuse. The second is money. A teenager can earn more stacking shelves on a Saturday than officiating two youth games, and nobody at the supermarket threatens to find out where they go to college.
The response from football’s governing bodies has, for years, been to run a campaign. Posters are printed. Players are asked to shake hands. Parents sign a code of conduct that they do not read and that is never enforced. The problem is not that nobody knows the rules of good behaviour. It is that breaking them costs nothing.
That must change, and the mechanisms are not complicated. A sin bin for adults, modelled on the one that has reduced dissent among players, would allow a referee to order a parent 50 metres from the pitch for 10 minutes without the confrontation of a full dismissal. A requirement that every youth club appoint a respect marshal, present at every home match and personally accountable for touchline conduct, would spread the burden of enforcement beyond a 15-year-old. A national minimum match fee of £40 would at least acknowledge that the job has a value.
None of this is expensive. All of it has been proposed before, usually by referees, and quietly dropped, usually by administrators who do not want to be seen punishing the paying parents on whom the grassroots game depends. That calculation is now wrong. The parents are not the game’s asset. The children are, and so are the people who make it possible for them to play. A sport that cannot protect a teenager with a whistle from a man in a club tracksuit does not deserve to be called a national game, and will not, for much longer, have enough referees to be one.
The Meridian view is a Daily Meridian columnist
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