The Beautiful Game in an Ugly Era: My View as a Soccer Referee and Journalist

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SAVE America, Epic Fury, “no quarter,” “Good. I’m glad he’s dead”… I need a break from the feed, and I suspect you’d welcome one too. 

So here, by way of a brief intermission at the Grand Guignol, is a personal story I’ve long wanted to tell.

I began refereeing soccer at age 37, when the league game following the one I was playing in didn’t have a ref because of a mix-up, and they asked, “Who here’s done this before?” 

I’m not sure what got into me, but I lied and said, “Me,” and someone found a whistle and I blew it.

And when I say “I blew it,” I mean I blew it. I was dreadful. I did so much wrong that I was lucky to have made it to the parking lot with my head still attached to my torso.

Nevertheless, I persisted. I was hooked. It may have been latent masochism, the thrill of getting yelled at — a staple of my formative years, long missed. Or perhaps it was the power of knowing that, right or wrong, I had the last word, was the authority. Perhaps a bit of both. Who knows what psychopathologies lurk in the hearts of 37-year-old adolescents?

But my best guess is something else: the joy of looking at a familiar thing through a new lens, coupled with the evocation of empathy — seeing conflict through the eyes of not just another but both others. 

Like a courtroom judge, with a decision to make, laws to apply, a mind open to the proverbial two sides of every story, and an ultimate dedication to fairness. 

A Simple Game, a Hard Job

Soccer has what I believe is by far the thinnest rule book of any major sport. Compared to the doorstops for football, basketball, and baseball, the somewhat officiously named “The Laws of the Game” is a mere pamphlet. 

So you might be surprised to learn that soccer is probably the most challenging sport to officiate.

This is not because of its formidable physical demands — the fact that, from international competition down to high school, we have to run like crazy, all over a large field or up and down its lines, often in full-out sprints, racking up as much as eight miles in a match.

Rather, it is because a thin rule book translates to a lot more left to judgment. Very little in soccer hinges on technicalities. It is a profoundly simple game: Here’s a ball; here’s a patch of ground; here’s a couple of posts with a bar across them; kick the ball through the posts; GOAL! Most goals win. (Fun fact: Soccer seems to have originated in 11th century England, when the severed heads of Danish invaders were kicked around in a victory celebration.) 

Once upon a time, a soccer referee’s job was to sit in a chair next to the field and settle disputes when called upon by the players to do so.

That was then. Now a referee is closer to a conductor of an orchestra, albeit a divided, hostile one — an integral part of what happens in a match. There are tough and critical judgments to be made between a fair play and a foul, between a foul and a yellow-card caution, between a caution and a red-card send-off.  

These gray areas, of course, also exist in other sports: It is said, for example, that every play in football could be called back for offensive holding. But the play in soccer is continuous — it has a flow, like a symphony or a story being told. And in and between the lines of that story, there’s at least as much gray as there is black and white.

It depends greatly on the level of play, the attitude of the teams and players, what “the game” expects on a particular day at a particular level, and how a match evolves. Which in turn has much to do with how you call it. It can be “the beautiful game” or a very ugly game — depending on how well you, as the referee team, do your job. 

That Was a War!

The rules — or Laws — are easy to master. Human behavior and human nature are not. 

Sports, after all, are a sublimated version of war. And while less flat-out violent than, say, American football, high-level competitive soccer is fast, with no pads, plenty of bone-crunching collisions, and serious potential for injury. 

You make the call!

At its best, soccer tends to be fierce. When someone at the conclusion of a match remarks, “That was a war,” it can ring disturbingly true. It falls to the referee to keep that “war” sporting.

I could tell you a book’s worth of “war stories” (as we refs call them). Of course, it’s the traumas and disasters that tend to carve a lifelong niche in our memories. 

The day I got chased through the streets of Lynn, Massachusetts, by a drunken, knife-wielding goalkeeper.

The abandoned State Cup match I whistled, where the goalie charged out and broke both of an attacker’s legs — and where, as hundreds of spectators stormed the field in a melee and the EMS sirens could be heard approaching, the coach of the injured player wouldn’t quit arguing with me that the foul was inside the penalty area!

The college match where my contact lens fell out and I had to wear my glasses (yes, I know!), which promptly fogged up so I couldn’t see anything, including what would have been the game-winning penalty kick.

The pro match where a shot caught me in the head and knocked me out cold.

The high school playoff match, played in 8 degrees above zero Fahrenheit, which went to 12 rounds of tie-breaking penalty kicks — with my arm so frozen I couldn’t even point.

What the Game Taught Me

There are, fortunately, lots more good memories than bad — and even of the bad I wouldn’t trade a minute! 

In the beginning, I was so innocent that I didn’t even know there was an occupational pyramid to climb; I just went out there and reffed, all adults, five or six matches every Sunday. But I began keeping a spreadsheet of my games in 1997, my third year, when I got serious about advancing professionally. 

The spreadsheet is now over 5,000 matches long. At roughly two hours per match, that’s a little over a solid year of my life spent “on the pitch” — not counting a few thousand training runs, study time, and more recent work mentoring younger colleagues. 

I never imagined, that first accidental day, that the sport or the job would play such a major role in my life. It has, in certain respects, shaped me more profoundly than any of my other ostensibly more “serious” roles. As with the “war stories,” I could write a book about lessons learned on the pitch. 

By far the most important one: No one is perfect and you don’t have to be. 

In fact, don’t even bother planning to be. Players make mistakes; coaches make mistakes; and you, the referee, will make mistakes. You will also make calls (or non-calls) that are not necessarily mistakes, but are controversial — someone, or a whole team, or a stadium full of fans will not be happy. They will get in your face; they will yell; they will boo!

That’s what keeps it from getting boring, makes you forget your sore knees, and — if the match is especially challenging — even forget for a moment about Donald Trump.

The Key to Survival and Success

The most successful referees are not necessarily the ones who get every call right (they don’t actually exist, or at least didn’t before video review), but those who can survive the ones they get wrong — or the ones players and coaches think they got wrong.

What it comes down to is something I mentioned earlier: fairness. That’s what, when all the competitive dust settles, pretty much everyone is looking for: a general, overarching sense that neither side has been gifted an unfair advantage.

I’d venture to say that just about every successful referee has a little fairness scale embedded somewhere in his or her head, and an exquisite sense of when it’s slipping out of balance.

Players, being human, will of course try to get away with things — commit fouls and act like they didn’t do it; deliberately cause injury and plead innocence, claim it was an accident or they didn’t mean to; pretend they’ve been fouled or injured when they haven’t. Players and coaches will “work” the refs, complain vociferously about one call in the hope of getting the next one, or a big one later in the match.

It’s all in a day’s (or night’s) work, our job being to sort all of that out, stay calm, blend authority with approachability, empathy, and, when appropriate, humor. We all have different personalities and different tools — if we’re successful, it’s because we’ve found in ourselves the right set of tools to fit the work we do. 

A referee’s authority rests ultimately on the Laws. A referee’s credibility and success rest on a communal perception of fairness and safety — that all his or her tools are being used to protect and promote these two principal values.

I’d venture to say that just about every successful referee has a little fairness scale embedded somewhere in his or her head, and an exquisite sense of when it’s slipping out of balance. Because when that balance slips too far — when the game, whether in reality or just perception, crosses that mystical line — that’s when things go south, and order and respect give way to chaos.

And in that, I believe, is a lesson for real life — for the arena I cover as a journalist. 

On the soccer pitch, the rule of law is embodied in the referee and his or her crew. Cheating, trying to get away with things, is a behavioral manifestation of lying, and the referee is there to make sure it is not tolerated — punished when observed, and deterred by the fear that it may be observed. Behaving recklessly, viciously, vengefully, endangering the safety of others are not tolerated, sanctioned according to the severity of the offense.

‘Governed by Force … Governed by Power’

Donald Trump and his ilk — the aspiring fascists he has taught so well how easy it is to just make things up and act viciously — would not last long on a soccer field. 

I’m known as a “players’ ref,” perhaps unduly sympathetic with the perpetrators out there, hoping that a show of understanding and gentle remonstration will appeal to the better angels I stubbornly believe are buried  somewhere within the hostile psyche of an elbow-throwing, studs-up slide-tackling miscreant. My card counts, yellow and red, are, for better or worse, always at or near the bottom (i.e., lowest) in the ranks. 

I would have red-carded and ejected Trump in the first minute of the match if he behaved on the soccer field anything like the way he has as president.

Because the match could not proceed with a chaos agent showing no respect for the Laws of the Game, and acting with impunity in a way that terrorized opponents and teammates alike.

And neither can our politics nor our republic proceed without at least some semblance of the rule of law — the Laws of its Game.

So where is the referee? Can there even be a referee in a “real world” that is, in the chilling words of Stephen Miller,

 governed by strength … governed by force … governed by power.

What can possibly be the Laws of that Game? Strength. Force. Power. Welcome back to the 11th century — with nukes.

Now we have the kind of game that you get when you have a bad referee — timid or biased or corrupt — or no referee at all. It’s uglier by far than the very worst match I can remember in my 30-year career.

There was, for all its faults and imperfections, the old order, domestic and global. Players were not always well-behaved; the referees missed some calls; injuries happened. 

But there was a framework — strong here under the Constitution, more tenuous and aspirational globally — a basic code of conduct underwritten by custom, moral awareness, and, corny as it may sound, the golden rule. Enforced, when necessary, by referees — nominally, the courts, but also the goodly crew of genuinely public servants, the adults in the room that Trump realized had to be eliminated for him to truly flourish.

When the Game Goes South

But now we have the kind of game that you get when you have a bad referee — timid or biased or corrupt — or no referee at all. It’s uglier by far than the very worst match I can remember in my 30-year career. It’s truly frightening.

This is, perhaps strangely, one of the reasons I continue to referee soccer at an age when most of my fellow refs have hung up their whistles. For two hours at a stretch, there on the field, the Laws hold; there +is order; there are bounds; there is fierce competition with fundamental and mutual respect; there is a framework of acceptance; and the game, ultimately, is bigger than any individual. This, in itself, brings a kind of joy and relief from the hyperbolic nightmare that is the Trumpocene.

Conversely, I think the soccer ref in me — for whom fairness and fair play have been the raison d’être for those 10,000 hours spent on those fields — is especially appalled by what has befallen us in real life, in Miller’s “real world” that feels more and more unreal to me.

Off the pitch, we are teetering on the brink. Some say it’s all because of Trump; some say it’s the whole rotten system that could give rise to such a rogue player; some say it’s on us for electing him twice; a few question the legitimacy of both those elections. 

But many, too many, don’t even see the brink — or don’t want to see it, and so look away. The “naaah” reflex is still strong within us, who were born and raised to take our democracy as a given.

I think it is fair to say that the institutions that normally control the game and make it a fair and safe one (more or less) have failed badly.

We might be encouraged that a few “referees” have come out of hiding, whether in Congress, the president’s own party, or in the courts, to call — by way of their votes, decisions, criticisms, or resignations — the occasional foul on Trump and his regime. Most notably, Europe seems at last to have found its whistle and shown a yellow card.

But if the game is to be saved from Trump’s brutality and the havoc he is wreaking, our chance won’t come until November, and we’d better be ready. 

We’ll each have a tiny little whistle and a tiny little red card. By sounding and showing them all together, we can, collectively, be referee for a day. We can start to stop the madness, contain the evil.

Trump, we know, is out to silence our whistles and stomp on our cards. We must not let this happen. WhoWhatWhy will be offering guidance all through the year on how to prevent Trump’s subversion of the election.

Then it is up to us. We know what “the beautiful game” looks like, and we know what a fair game looks like. And we know what it takes to get them back. That must be our mission, our goal.