Following on from my first piece in this series (LINK HERE), in which I tried to place the modern game of football in a wider societal context, I am now turning my attention to the way that football fans engage with each other. This takes place within the context outlined last time, and I hope may also shed some light on the lack of impact fans have had so far on officiating.

Where Is The Resistance?

To me, it is utterly baffling that I have never seen any kind of committed, united approach from football fans to improvement in refereeing standards. Even upon searching for what organisations or campaigns are pushing for reform I can find… oh, so little. So depressingly, heart-achingly little that a simple snap judgement would be that fans just don’t care. Certainly, it would be hard to argue that fans are interested in seeing improvement in refereeing standards if one were only allowed to look at what actions fans have taken to improve them.

I have been able to find a few petitions to parliament on various refereeing issues (all relating to transparency and improving standards) none of which have garnered more than 30 signatures. There are many petitions on Change.org that have fared little better.

There are individual fans’ groups and supporters’ clubs that have published articles and opinions, or drafted statements asking for better refereeing. I can find no body that has collated these, nor any sign that any of these groups has joined with any other groups to call for change. If such a body exists, its efforts have little online presence, drastically diminishing their value.

There are, however, a laughable number of links to articles about how the dire and still-declining standard of officiating has to be improved, articles which seem to have been produced consistently for the last twenty years!

So, when the internet is full of debate (and vitriol) about how often the referees get it wrong, why is it that there is no effective organisation of fans’ voices, or any sustained pressure to improve the situation?

Fight For Your Right (To Squabble Amongst Yourselves)

The first answer to this question is the very obvious one; that fans are too united by their enmity for each other to band together in a common cause.

Football media and social media is now set up to ‘divide and conquer’. People are funnelled towards extreme viewpoints, encouraged to identify with certain groups they feel they belong to and to espouse the views and rights of those groups above those of others. As I mentioned in the last article, this socially corrosive effect can be seen in more important arenas than football, as the rise of misogyny and extremist politics amply demonstrate.

However, we should be under no illusions that the mechanisms used to pit football fans against each other are any different from those used to radicalise people into racism, sexism or any other form of discrimination. Although, having a blanket opinion that all Man Utd fans are entitled, all Spurs fans are deluded, or all Arsenal fans are whingers is socially permissible in mainstream society in the way that catch-all opinions about people grouped by race, sex or religion are not.

Even though most of us like to think of ourselves as unbiased and un-bigoted (much like referees do) many of us now have regular interactions in a system designed to push us away from this stance and towards a fixed viewpoint. Do we take enough account of this and intermittently remember to ask difficult questions of ourselves? Is it okay to dismiss, or summarily argue against, the opinion of someone just because they support a different team to us? Is it helpful to us, or anyone else? Would we behave the same way if we were sitting at a table with the people we were engaging with, accountable in a personal sense for our actions?

Perhaps most importantly, as football fans, do we consider seriously enough the influences we are subject to and how they shape our discourse and the ways we interact?

I suppose these are questions for individuals; just a few of many such questions in a society which allows big players to take actions that negatively impact huge groups of people whilst simultaneously claiming it is up to the individuals in those groups to resist their sway.

In as far as football officials go, the focus on individual decisions made by referees, rather than a broader, thematic look at the recurring problems, guarantees that in-fighting will trump the common good.

For any decision that goes against a team, opposition fans will far outnumber those of the wronged team.

Since we have former referees and pundits keen to justify any refereeing decision, there is (for those who need it) more than enough ‘expert’ opinion for fans of other clubs to feel justified in arguing the correctness of a decision that they would rail against if it had been given against their own team.

Other fans do not even need the veneer of righteousness provided by the agreement of their preferred football media outlets to argue for any decision that goes against their rivals and to lambast fans of those clubs who dare to claim the referee is at fault; they have been radicalised too far and are swept along by the social proofing of what all the other online fans of their clubs are doing; there is more than enough noise to silence any lingering voice which asks “hang on, is that really a good call?”

Does that even matter if it would detract from the strength of the point you are virulently arguing to a stranger you’ll never meet?

These opinions derived from which club we support rather than what we impartially judge to have happened on a football pitch, and the way we then prosecute them, are hugely unhelpful, serving as they do to maintain the status quo and drowning out calls for better standards – calls which we all immediately throw our voices behind when, in the arbitrary game of musical chairs that refereeing has become, the music stops when a decision is erroneously made against our team…

Except, now the boot is on the other foot and the fans of all the other clubs band together to shout us down. Oh, our short-sightedness!

Will we learn for next time?

Will we sausages!

We’ll just start again at the beginning of the cycle, happy to have our carefully cultivated addiction to emotional drama sated as we play it out over and over.

For a cynic or a Machiavellian, it’s a beautiful system to see in action. Divided we stand, divided we fall. And we have fallen so far.

Although we are all partisan in the way we watch football, there are times when, for the good of the game and also for all of us involved with it, we must unite. We must drop our tribal identity as fans of individual teams and instead pick up our tribal identity as ‘football fans’. In a system that seeks to divide our loyalties and play us off into warring factions, this adoption of a shared identity perhaps offers one glimmer of hope, an insight into how we might redefine ourselves sufficiently to stop the in-fighting and work together for change.

If We Want Victory… Could We Give Harmony A Chance?

For me, personally, a good rule of thumb to help me fight the pull towards imbalance, or the simple urge to revel in a bad decision which hurts a rival team rather than disagree with it on principle, is to ask how I would feel about the decision if it went against my team? If I would think it were wrong going against my team then the only way I am ever going to see the system that keeps churning out these errors overhauled and replaced by a better one is by standing shoulder to shoulder with fans of other clubs when it goes against them. And yes, that includes Spurs fans… whom, I should note, as a group, are one I unfairly malign. Which is weird, given that almost every individual Spurs fan I know is a thoroughly decent person, and the percentage I could deem otherwise is no higher than it would be in any other group. Then again, almost all Gooners dislike Spurs fans. We are supposed to. And I am a Gooner. I am part of that ‘we’ that identifies against Spurs. And there it is… it is so easy justify what a non-sports fan could just as easily regard as pure, baseless prejudice.

Was it ever this way? TTG’s fantastic three part series on that rivalry (LINK TO PART 1 HERE), soon to be serialised in The Gooner fanzine, suggests not. So why is it that fans these days are united by what they stand against rather than what they stand for?

There have been studies that show people are less likely to help a person who falls over in the street if they are wearing a rival team’s jersey. Think about that. However harmlessly we view them, if our prejudices genuinely spill over into real-life situations, preventing us from stepping in to aid a fellow human being in distress, then what effect do they have in impersonal, online spaces where a culture of belligerence and personal abuse is prevalent? And is it any wonder we can’t all get on the same page?

You Can’t Handle The Truth!

A second answer to my question is that it is the effect, once again, of fake news.

After a recent match where the referee made some questionable decisions, a sensible, thoughtful and intelligent friend of mine sent me a link to a post that gave false statistics regarding the number of fouls committed by each team, designed to make it look as though the referee was even more impartial than the true stats would have provided evidence for.

There will be plenty of people who saw that post and believed those stats, using them to back a false narrative in a way that detracted from an impartial appraisal of the actual events on the pitch. The general air of misinformation, and the abdication of all responsibility to engage in a serious and important debate in good faith is, frankly, alarming.

Accusing someone of having ‘an agenda’ has become a trite way of dismissing dissent or disagreement. Often it is simply used to railroad discussion by those who wish to shut down, rather than engage with, a view contrary to their own (or, at least as often, a view that on the surface appears contrary to their own, or a view that comes from a source outside of a group they identify with – usually, from fans of other teams).

Unfortunately, it is far easier to play the agenda card and slander someone as some sort of partisan conspiracy theorist than it should be, because there is genuinely a lot of this stuff flying around and people are just too saturated and swamped with information to sift the fact from the fiction, the zealots from the sceptics, the ones who want answers from the ones who already have all their answers and are not open to changing their minds.

We get worn down by such a vast swell of information and opinion that we cease to process any of it and so we rely on a few sources of information that affirm the viewpoints we already held, rarely noticing if they follow the standard trend of slowly becoming more extreme and entrenched over time.

And this is not because we are stupid, or idiotic, or because we don’t care.

It is because the water we swim in is too dirty for us to purify it as individuals. Without a much wider concerted effort, it is almost impossible to get out of this fishbowl. It is far easier and quicker just to make snap decisions that affirm what we want to believe, just like my friend did when he forwarded that link. And just as I have doubtless done many times myself and will continue to do in the future. I certainly do it regarding referees! Hell, I’ve probably done it in this article, so please feel free to point out anywhere you think that is the case.

None of us are immune, but recognising this is a useful understanding in itself; it invites us to question ourselves more and listen to others more thoughtfully. Perhaps ironically, perhaps simply logically, we need to be doing exactly the things that I would advocate for the referees: less assuming that we know best, welcoming criticism, and collaborating more to work towards outcomes that benefit us all.

No Bird Pecks Like The Ostrich

In a future article I am going to look at the area of subconscious bias in referees. For now, as I wish to make a point about how we, as fans, respond to other fans who enquire about the effect this has, I will simply say that subconscious bias is a proven phenomenon, universally accepted by all psychology professionals. A vast number of organisations, from universities to hospitals, police forces and countless others, have specific training and guidelines to counteract this unavoidable consequence of how the human brain processes information.

Yet, as soon as a fan dares to suggest that there may be some subconscious bias at play in the decisions of a group of white men from the Northwest of England, there will be so many more who will pop up to call them conspiracy theorists and make pejorative comments.

Is this a rational and scientific approach?

No. Indisputably, it is not.

In other walks of life, would these naysayers refute a huge and professionally uncontested body of evidence in favour of their own opinions? I doubt it. I cannot imagine these same people – the ones who refuse to put aside their entrenched belief in referees’ fairness and instead ask what the evidence shows – apply a similar head-in-sand approach when discussing climate change, brain surgery, or the effects of owning a pet on a person’s propensity towards clinical depression.

Sure, there are some flat-earthers out there. But refusing to ask rigorous questions of how unconscious bias affects referees because of a belief that the referees are trying their best to be impartial is far closer to a flat-earther’s stance than to a scientific one.

Referees may well be trying their very best to be impartial. But asking questions about whether they exhibit subconscious bias (the clue is in the name) should not be cause for being dismissed like you’ve just asserted that the problem with referees is that they are all part of a cult that worships the Loch Ness monster.

Strangely though, there are keenly intelligent and analytical individuals who wear as a badge of honour their refusal to ask a single question about what the evidence shows about referees’ performances.

All of which again touches on why honest, good faith debate and discussion is more vital than ever before, and the attempts to pre-emptively win an argument instead of simply to engage in a conversation are having such a deleterious effect.

Making Your Voice Heard – Time For A Referendum?

It is appropriate then to ask, what is the proper forum for these conversations? Is there a scenario whereby fans can exert consistent pressure to improve standards in refereeing? If so, what does that look like and what needs to be done to get us there?

Are we, as fans, doing all we can to bring about the changes we wish to see?

In the current atmosphere, there is general dissatisfaction with referees amongst most fans and clubs, but no effective, co-ordinated efforts to improve the situation. The first line of defence against any such action is, as mentioned, to point the finger at any fan or club who make a complaint as being in some way out of order, a crackpot with an agenda, or a cheat (logic is not necessary for this style of ‘refutation’). And then to descend into petty in-fighting whilst those perpetuating this system sit back and watch. Or, more likely, ignore the debate completely since it won’t affect their system, or their bottom line, in the slightest.

Are we happy for this to continue?

Four PL clubs released statements last year questioning the overall standards of the referees.

Did this generate curiosity, debate and initiatives to acquire and examine more data?

No.

Were all the clubs uniformly lambasted in the media and online?

Yes.

Did anything change?

It did not.

If you were tasked with designing a system where refs could act with impunity, arbitrarily administering the rules as they felt like it to the benefit of vast and wealthy entities, whilst the people negatively impacted by their poor decisions argued each other into submission whenever anyone suggested a change… well, then you would not have a difficult task. Perpetuating the system we have would rank pretty high on your list of options.

It has been chosen.

Is it not time to choose again?

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Readers in the Goonerholic bar run by the inimitable Dave Faber or this establishment setup in his honour will have had the dubious pleasure of reading my opinions about referees down the years. 

Well, guess what, you lucky souls?

There is plenty more in the tank!

To briefly summarise what I’ve already said… I don’t think they are any good at their jobs.

I think it is fair to say that most fans think refereeing standards are declining steadily and have been for years, yet also think they are powerless to do anything about it.

This provides a backdrop of frustration (or sheer downright anger) and a sense of injustice which permeates fans’ discussions. It is not improved by what most fans see as a refusal from PGMOL to accept that there is a problem with refereeing standards.

This general air of dissatisfaction rumbles on amongst fans and tends to be most vociferous immediately after some particularly egregious error. As such, the discussions centre around minute dissection of individual decisions, sliced up and placed under the microscope.

From such close range, the bigger picture is harder to see, and this focus on individual incidents and officials make it difficult to place what we see every week a larger societal context.

Perhaps we need to put our microscopes away, find a different vantage point, and look through a different lens?

That is what I am going to attempt in this piece; to walk a few miles in the opposite direction and look back at things with my binoculars, as it were.

The end result won’t be perfect, any more than that leggy metaphor was!  I will miss important points and struggle to make sense of complex and sweeping influences which affect us in more profound ways than the quality of refereeing. But all of that is how it should be; that is merely a sign that the issues we face are indeed complex.

So, I’d like to approach this as an exploration and invite all of you to tell me where you think I have wandered off-trail or where you think I have missed a promising avenue of investigation.

I am committed to improving and refining the ideas laid out here. I am curious what others think and accept that they will have vital pieces of the puzzle that make up the bigger picture I hope to see more clearly. And I know I will have made mistakes along the way, which are all my own, and for which I take full responsibility.

However, through a process of collaboration marked by openness to constructive criticism and a genuine desire to learn and progress, I am sure I will get a lot further than I would on my own.

I might be wrong about this too.

However, I am not a PL referee, so I am willing to give this sort of madness a shot…

The formation of the Premier League changed the context in which football was played and the way that people engaged with it, which previously had been largely fixed for decades.

In the olden days, when everything was black and white, and nobody had ever heard the word ‘digital’, people went to matches or listened to them on the radio. They read reports in the newspapers and discussed them in person. Live games on TV were rare.

In the early 90s, the PL and Sky Sports changed that, and many more fans had access to football, both domestically and internationally.

Money began to pour in, and savvy people woke up to the fact that there were a lot of fans invested in football and there was serious wonga to be made.

When the internet became ubiquitous in daily life, the means of discussing football changed drastically – now there is exponentially more online engagement than there is discussion in person, and a vast proliferation of platforms and (virtual) places where people can do so, including this one.

(Note that I deliberately use ‘discussion’ when describing what people tend to do in person, but ‘engagement’ is as far as I am prepared to commit myself in describing what people tend to do online.)

But football is not the only thing swept along by the tide of change; anything and everything you can think of is along for the ride and, boy oh boy, there are a lot more things a person can do online than talk about the football.

Nowadays, the competition for the attention of human beings looking at screens is staggering. The amount of money invested in it is beyond comprehension, yet the returns prove that dosh to be soundly invested indeed.

Football is competing for attention in that arena, in a context in which it has never had to compete before, where attention means money. And it is changing accordingly.

Football is no longer just a game where people kick an inflated pig bladder about.

It has become a behemoth of interlinked media, marketing, advertising, branding and the rest of the long list of those favourite cash-generating sons of capitalism that dominate so much of modern life.

The media that we consume football ‘content’ through are designed solely to make a profit, and they protect the interests of their bottom line, nothing else.

So, in the context of refereeing, it makes sense that our media providers prop up a system which generates bad decisions and, in turn, engagement across their services. They court as much controversy as they can and hire people to stir things up. This is a relatively new type of broadcasting and one that provides an important backdrop for the current attitude towards, and administration of, officiating.

In terms of providing the drama that people are so addicted to – having been weaned on it so carefully and cynically by vast entities whose raison d’etre is to make money from hijacking their attention – dodgy decisions that cause a lot of people to go online and argue about them is a better outcome than consistently correct decisions that stir up no controversy. 

Why would the hugely powerful organisations making money off these constant controversies wish to improve the current standards?

And why should they, when their competitors won’t budge an inch or be hamstrung by a notion of fair play or sporting integrity?

The makers of the myriad games you can play on your phone won’t be deliberately making their products duller, and neither will anyone else competing for the attention of football fans in markets that have never before been directly in competition with those packaging and selling football content.

Even twenty years ago, I would have felt more of a cynic in writing that. Nowadays, we are all aware that online content is geared towards engagement; the target is anything that gets people to watch it and comment on it, and if that means algorithms promote racist or sexist content to teenagers, or do anything else that eschews decency, respect and goodness in the pursuit of increased screentime, then so be it.

Make no mistake, this is the world within which modern football operates.

Back in the day, football computer games tried to look as much like the real thing as possible, to appeal to people who watched football, the obvious target audience for a football game.

Nowadays, Sky Sports constantly plug a new mode of watching a live match with camera angles designed to make it look like a computer game! 

This is a way to maintain the interest of a new generation who have grown up playing computer games far more than they have watching live football. They find it easier to maintain their flickering attention on a football match if it looks like the games they are used to.

Computer games used to imitated the real thing; now that process has reversed.

If this seems a little 1984, perhaps it might best be viewed not as a part of any concerted plan, but simply as a logical consequence of everyone involved following the money whenever they have a decision to make. The cumulative effect down the years is more Darwinian than Orwellian, shaping the football landscape one step at a time.

There is an old saying that the fish in the fishbowl cannot see the water it swims in.

I think any discussion of officiating needs at least to attempt to see the ‘water’ that modern football is swimming in. It is such a huge influence and, I think, provides a necessary context for any meaningful debate.

To reiterate, football these days is all about the money; and whilst most people appreciate that in theory, it is worth scratching a little deeper to see what this really means.

To offer just three instructive indicators; clubs are now owned by billionaires and investment funds (who most certainly did not get involved for the love of the game); shirts are emblazoned with betting company logos (I’ll leave you to decide for yourself whether you think this is a good thing); PL TV rights sell for billions of pounds.

The list of ways the game has demeaned and diluted itself for a steady stream of ever-increasing money is a long one. A very long one indeed. All fans need a level of cognitive dissonance to support our clubs these days, as the water all clubs necessarily swim in is getting ever murkier. Be it sponsorship deals, the contempt matchday fans are treated with by schedulers, the environmental impact of the game, or any other of the vast morally grey areas in how the game operates, we all have things about our clubs that we must set aside if we wish to continue supporting them.

It should not surprise us that all the entities who would hold sway in the matter exhibit a complete lack of interest in any debate about genuinely improving refereeing standards, as they actively do not want to see better refereeing. In their ideal world, people argue increasingly about referees, whilst the standard of officiating worsens at a slow enough pace that people gradually become inured to it and, incrementally, accept decisions that a decade previously they would never have swallowed. 

Instead of informed and honest enquiry into what is needed for the long-term good of the game, we are bombarded with that new phenomenon being grappled with in contexts far more important than football: fake news.

We are gaslit into thinking that decisions which obviously contravene the laws of the game are in fact correct. We are told it is somehow appropriate that referees fail to punish dangerous behaviour and serious foul play yet dish out cards and subsequent bans for minor infractions.

Decisions are justified under the ‘letter of the law’ when scores of the same offences go unpunished every week. This inconsistency is mentioned sometimes in the same way one might talk about rain on a summer day – a bit annoying but ultimately not something anyone can do anything about, so you’d have to be some sort of unreasonable curmudgeon or proud wearer of a tin-foil hat to dwell on it.

To take just one specific example, there is a former referee who I have personally seen employed by Sky Sports to comment mid-match on a penalty decision. Having watched a few replays, he explained to the viewers that the referee had made the correct decision. When, a couple of minutes later, VAR had invited the on-field referee to review those same replays and he reversed his decision, the former ref being paid by Sky assured us (without shame, and contrary to what he had confidently asserted moments earlier) that this was, in fact, the correct decision. Apparently, people are supposed to respect his opinion, provided to us as a trusted authority on the rules of the game. You could not make it up.

These former referees who have paid gigs on television do nothing more than back up their mates. There is no standard of personal integrity they will not violate, nor any mental contortion they cannot manage in the name of sticking up for the Old Boy’s Club.

It stinks. Fans (consumers) have never asked for it. But it is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Why?

Because it perpetuates the myth that there is no reform necessary – the referees do a great job and officiating is of a high standard. Ahem!

Sometimes, this cronyism is picked up and railed against. By some. For a while. And then, once everyone has had a good rant and vented their feelings, we all settle back into the status quo, and just hope we get through the next weekend without another egregious error befalling us. Because, after all, there isn’t anything we can do about it, right?

Instead of persistent focus on the poor standard of refereeing and what can be done about it, we are bombarded and insulted by a proliferation of explanations that defy logic and a basic understanding of football in order to illustrate that decisions that we can all see are ludicrous are actually correct.

If the laws of the game are unrecognisable from those you have known your entire life, then that isn’t because they have been highjacked and are arbitrarily administered by a small cabal of men in black. Oh no, it is just a simple lack of knowledge on your part!

But, fear not brave reader, you will be put out of your ignorance by a former pro referee who is happy to explain this week’s handball rule to you, or why the kind of assault you would be arrested for on a public street carries no punishment under the laws of the game.

Yet, despite the regularity and sheer brazenness of this narrative, people seem happier to go along with all this and argue vociferously with each other rather than address the actual problem. Of all the people who are wound up by the officiating standards, and there are many, most argue against each other, rather than arguing for change.

Does anyone really believe that it is an impossible task to make a clear handball rule and then apply it consistently? Yet every week we are offered a new interpretation, and contradictory views espoused by pundits who were saying something different the week before.

When did officiating become so chaotic?

Seriously. When did it become so utterly, abjectly chaotic?

And who does this chaos benefit?

There is no longer even the semblance of an obligation for our media outlets to impartially report and evaluate football matches; that just does not keep enough people watching.

We now have phone-in shows that don’t bother with analysis but simply employ figurehead presenters to make crass statements designed to goad people, and then spend the next hour allowing the angriest and least coherent people they can find the opportunity to be further wound up and vent over the airwaves. Because they can sell that to other people who turn up for the drama, in a way that they cannot sell rational, civil discourse.

Behind the scenes, we get told that these presenters are actually reasonable and personable, they just get paid to play a role in which they aggravate as many people as possible. Well, that’s all okay then.

How could anyone find fault there?

Although now I think about it, I don’t remember signing up for that.

I am starting to think I missed a meeting…

We have entered a new era where football is an entertainment industry far more than a sporting one, and there is more money in entertainment than there is in sport.

It is in this context that the conversation of officiating has to take place.

Next time, I will look at us as fans, and how we engage with each other, and how this shapes the debate.

Until then, I know I can rely on you all to be a shining example of how I wish football fans engaged with each other everywhere, so light up the drinks with your thoughts and wisdom.

Until next time, ‘holics.

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If you’re reading this brilliant post on the ‘Home Screen’ just hit the word ‘Drinks’ at the foot of the article to read and join discussion of all things Arsenal (and some other stuff) stimulated by this article and the responses from the regular denizens of this virtual bar. If you’ve accessed this post directly, simply scroll down to see the thoughts of fellow Gooners and join the discussion.