Why is referee abuse so widespread in England? ‘It’s a big history lesson’, says former Premiership Rugby television match official
Hello, Luke here. As part of my master’s degree, I wrote a three-part series covering referee abuse in English football. This is the final chapter: check out section one and section two.
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“I was kicked as I bent down to pick up the ball because a player didn’t accept a decision I’d made,” Ant Canavan, leader of The Referee Forum, explains.
“I obviously sent him off for violent conduct, but his coach’s instinct was to question my judgement. There’s a horrible culture in football: the sport is fantastic, but this cancer exists within it because we’re accepting of abuse towards referees.
“If you’re a spectator, it’s great to watch a player having a tantrum and being able to nudge your mate and say ‘isn’t that funny?’ but the reality is that it filters all the way down to grassroots. I’ve experienced it; it’s not nice.”
Although football remains England’s national sport, a shortage of referees threatens its future, with match officials quitting in their droves as a climate of abuse infects all levels of the game.
Players, coaches, and administrators say the issue has reached every corner of the country, impacting youth fixtures and Sunday leagues alike. Referee numbers have fallen by a third since 2017, with 10,000 hanging up their whistles.
Canavan, booted by a 13-year-old boy, is calling on the Football Association (FA) to do more to protect referees. However, he is not optimistic about where the sport is headed after the national governing body replaced its ‘no ref, no game’ campaign with a ‘show some respect’ plea.
“They’ve abandoned the idea that people can be respectful to match officials, so they’ve just said ‘show some respect’ as if that’s the bar now. We’ve gone from ‘no ref, no game’ to ‘can you at least show some respect?’ and that’s it,” he says.
“We’ve lost more than 10,000 referees over the last five seasons and the FA’s saying ‘maybe we can just ask people not to call them the nastiest names in the book.’ Their campaigns are having zero impact on the sport and the situation is only getting worse.”
Although it is acknowledged that referee abuse is a serious issue in English football, the path to fixing the problem is unclear, with the situation varying from sport to sport and country to country.
Keith Lewis, the founder of RugbyReferee.net and laws of the game coordinator for World Rugby, says the sport’s heritage shapes how it deals with abuse.
“It’s a big history question,” the former Premiership Rugby television match official explains.
“Respect has always been a core value of rugby from the very start: there’s the apocryphal tale about William Webb Ellis picking up the ball during a football match, running down to the other end of the pitch, and his response to the teacher telling him off was ‘it’s okay sir, I thought it was worth a try.’ Even at that point, he broke the rules but there was still a respect element.”
But there is more to rugby’s record of two-way respect than a story about its founding player and inaugural star: a culture of decency is drilled into players from the first time they step onto the field, with referees empowered by the rulebook to reinforce those norms.
“It’s written into law that dissent is a sanctionable offence, we’ve always refereed it that way, and we’ve got additional tools in our armoury to advance a penalty up the pitch [when arguments take hold],” Lewis says, noting the reluctance of football referees to be as strict.
“Players know that if they show dissent, it’ll hurt their team, and you won’t find referees who are afraid to manage that situation – which links back to how the respect agenda has been pushed into all of us.”
Culture is integral to sports the world over. Every decision is fought along partisan lines, with rational thinking overtaken by tribalism.
To tackle the negative consequences of when passion boils over, England’s governing body for rugby union, the RFU, operates with five core values that “define the game”. Teamwork, respect, enjoyment, discipline, and sportsmanship constitute the ‘TREDS’ approach, including a provision covering match officials.
“Mutual respect forms the basis of [rugby]. We hold high esteem in our sport, its values and traditions and earn the respect of others in the way we behave. We respect our match officials and accept their decisions,” the RFU writes.
Lewis, who is responsible for adapting the sport’s laws, adds: “World Rugby uses a similar approach, the playing charter includes ‘integrity, passion, solidarity, discipline, and respect’, it’s just different words.
“I’ve got an 11- and 13-year-old [who play the sport] and they know about TREDS because it’s talked about all the time. That kind of mantra is drilled into them from U5s, so they know that’s how rugby works and that’s what they have to do when they’re on the field.”
‘We Only Do Positive’ is the FA’s equivalent, which “encourages coaches and parents within mini-soccer and youth football to bring about a better, more inclusive and supportive football environment.”
Critics say the FA’s agenda is insufficient, while Lewis suggests governing bodies face an uphill battle to reshape culture, especially when it reaches English football’s level of entrenchment.
“I’m not going to sit here and say that we’re the perfect sport: abuse happens and you see dissent all the time. However, there’s fast intervention when it crops up, it isn’t just left to referees to deal with. When I was involved in the Premiership, conversations we had around rugby’s values were driven by the players and their association.
“They came to us to say ‘we’ve seen this and we’re not happy about it, and you need to crack down on it.’ It didn’t take a group of maverick referees to solve the problem because we had allies on the pitch. It’s much harder to create a culture like rugby’s than it is to maintain it.”
However, rugby is not unique. English football’s lack of a solid charter is the outlier.
Canada’s sporting obsession is ice hockey. In a nation of two languages, puck-whacking is the predominant source of solidarity, with Francophones and Anglophones united through a shared appreciation of the world’s fastest team pursuit.
Hockey culture rests on ‘the code’, a set of norms synonymous with the sport’s rough-and-tumble heritage. It demands that netminders are protected, teams are prioritised over individuals, and showmanship is kept to a minimum.
When hockey’s covenant is broken, all hell breaks loose, with rules of engagement set by ‘the code’. Turtling isn’t allowed, nor is punching stricken rivals or duelling with smaller opponents. It’s an honourable sport after all.
However, Mark Walters, a junior hockey coach and former referee, is visibly puzzled when asked if ‘the code’ oversees interactions between officials and players. Canada’s referee shortage speaks for itself: 17,000 officials have left the official registry since 2019.
“Well, it’s about players being respectful to each other,” he explains 4,600 kilometres away in Nova Scotia, “there isn’t an unwritten rule when it comes to referees.”
Walters, a member of the Canadian Navy, turned his back on refereeing when he was physically confronted after a men’s league game.
“I made a couple of calls against a player who kept slashing guys and kicked him out because he hit his limit for penalties,” Walters says. “He waited for me in the parking lot and attacked me after the game – it was a bad idea on his part.”
Potvin drove home, filed his report to the regional hockey association, and retired his whistle. His assaulter was banned from the league, but only because he was a second-time offender. Hockey offers second chances, not thirds.
However, the sport’s issues aren’t isolated to senior fixtures: abuse is prevalent in the junior ranks too.
“When I was officiating AAA [junior hockey], I heard some pretty creative chirps from some of the kids, but they’re just venting, and I didn’t mind awarding a misconduct for that,” Walters explains, dressed head to toe in his naval uniform. “It’s the parents, people I knew, who came up with nasty shit: horrible things about my parents, wife, and kids.”
In a separate incident, he witnessed a hockey mum launch an airhorn at a linesman because her child was repeatedly called offside. She was ejected from the rink but returned a week later, so much for ‘the code.’
Although Hockey Canada is taking steps to tackle referee abuse, the sport’s culture of silence is making the situation worse. Instead, regional organisations are implementing policy changes, including the introduction of a ‘respect course’ for parents in Nova Scotia and lengthier bans for abusers in British Columbia.
NB: Since writing this article in the spring, Hockey Canada has been rocked by a series of high-profile scandals relating to sexual misconduct. The governing body has serious issues to address on multiple fronts.
Back in Europe, the Dutch FA has made significant progress in combatting referee abuse – albeit fuelled by the tragic killing of a volunteer linesman in December 2012.
Richard Nieuwenhuizen was attacked by six players and a parent after an U17s match between SC Buitenboys and Nieuw-Sloten. The 41-year-old collapsed three hours after he was kicked in the head and died from his injuries the following day.
Nieuwenhuizen’s death sparked a total football reset in the Netherlands, with supplementary discipline tightened and ID cards introduced to break the cycle. It worked.
“I’ve spoken to referees from Holland and they’re absolutely flabbergasted that I would step onto a football pitch at a reasonable level in the football pyramid without team sheets or ID cards: we’re going out there blind,” Canavan says. “If players don’t have their IDs in the Netherlands, they don’t play. It’s that simple.”
Dutch referees are now less likely to quit and experience abuse than their colleagues across the continent. According to the University of Portsmouth, 93 percent of referees in England have suffered verbal abuse. In the Netherlands, only 51 percent faced similar experiences.
Although the Dutch FA was stunned into action, its sharp turnaround suggests policymaking is the answer. The Netherlands’ football culture didn’t shift overnight: change was driven by serious measures designed to affect behaviour across the board.
With stories of abuse now a weekly occurrence, referees in England are left wondering what it will take for their FA to spring into life.
“I know referees who have been assaulted and that wasn’t enough for any meaningful reform,” Canavan says reluctantly. “It really frightens me that someone will have to die before we bring in what we should already have. What will it take for the FA to acknowledge that we have a serious problem?”
It’s time for actions, not words.
The comparison to rugby is intriguing, I wonder if the different player bases makes a difference?