Euro 2024 has been awash with eye-catching new footballing talent, from Spain’s wunderkind Lamine Yamal to Turkey’s precocious teenager Arda Guler. Yet one of its most conspicuous stars has not been on the pitch, but closely watching slow-motion clips from it.
Referee analyst Christina Unkel, who has featured in every game broadcast by ITV, has won over fans with her calm and detailed explanations, and clear mastery of the rules of the modern game.
On the phone from Germany, days before analysing decisions made during the Euros final between England and Spain, the American laughs at the idea of being any kind of star.
“It’s kind of weird to hear that statement,” she says. “Because from an official’s perspective, we are always trying not to be a breakout star. Less media is good media … we don’t want to be a talking point.”
Unkel’s talents are not limited to putting Roy Keane straight on the nuances of the offside rule. She is also a practising litigation attorney and next month will launch a women’s football team in the new USL Super League in the US.
The 37-year-old took her first course in refereeing when she was just 10 and went on to become a Fifa referee. But it was a realisation that there was a growing chasm between referees and the rest of the footballing community that made her move into broadcasting in 2019.
“I could see the division happening, it was causing anger,” she says. “Nobody was controlling the narrative in a healthy way, through education and through information.”
On ITV she has dealt with forthright, occasionally baffled, questions from pundits such as Gary Neville, Ian Wright and Keane in the studio with calm magnanimity. “It’s healthy, meaningful conversation,” she says. “I tell them all the time: ‘Don’t hesitate to throw me something. Because if you’re having that question, millions of people back home are having the exact same question.’”
During England’s thrilling last-minute victory over the Netherlands on Wednesday, Unkel had no qualms about declaring that they should not have been given a penalty, after the the video assistant referee asked the official on the pitch to look again at his initial decision (she later went on to provide a 386-word explanation in a detailed thread on X). She maintains that as there was no clear and obvious error from the referee, the decision should not have been reviewed. “If the no penalty decision remained, would anybody be talking about it the next day? The answer is no.”
It was unlikely to be a popular stance, but she says she felt no nerves, and the half-expected backlash from England fans never materialised. “If anything, a lot of people were like: ‘Yeah, we agree with you. It wasn’t a penalty, but we’ll take it’,” she says with a laugh.
Unkel is pragmatic about the effect of technological advances on football, including the inclusion of semi-automated offsides, derisively referred to as “toenail offsides”, that denied Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku three goals in his opening two matches. The often furious debate about VAR “ruining the game”, needs to be flipped, she argues. “Statistically, [VAR] has made the game more accurate. That’s basically a hard stop,” she says. “Where I don’t believe it’s made the game better is where punditry is spending more time talking about VAR and referee errors than about the beautiful game.”
She urges the media and pundits to focus on what she thinks viewers really want: analysis of the play. “It’s easier to be angry than it is to be happy, there’s plenty of literature and statistical data on that,” she says. “But at the same time, it’s also breaking down and tearing apart the game. Everyone says, ‘the game is gone’, and we’re losing – but we’re kind of doing it to ourselves.”
This undercurrent of rage has a negative effect on all aspects of the game, with abuse or disrespect from managers or players “trickling down to that 14-or 15-year-old boy and girl refereeing a game getting abused by a full-grown-ass adult”.
She adds: “It’s not lost on any official, especially at the highest levels, that a bad decision could directly or indirectly cost the manager their job […] But if we have to redirect the attention, if we have to reclaim our game, that is within our control.”
More than two decades of experience has taught Unkel to remain detached from criticism, and even though she has faced some abuse for having the audacity to be both an American and a woman (“if you’re gonna go for all the boxes, at least, include the minority,” she jokes, referring to her Hispanic heritage), it has not been as vociferous as she had feared.
“There was a bit of ‘she’s American, she’s a bird’, that came up and very quickly subsided,” she says. “If you’re qualified, if you trust in your training, you can cut through that negativity.”
She admits that she hasn’t always felt comfortable with being a trailblazer for her sex, wanting to be thought of as a “great referee”, rather than a female referee. But an encounter with a young boy of Hispanic background during her legal work changed that, after he said he didn’t know that Hispanic women could be attorneys.
“It was an innocent statement, and I think for me, it really hit that seeing is believing,” she says. “I realised, if I can move the needle, even if it’s for one person that I will never meet, it’s worth the effort. Because if I can create a world that I needed that didn’t exist when I was growing up for the next person, then that person is going to create an even better world for the next generation.”
Looking forward to Sunday, Unkel is positive about England’s prospects against a marauding Spanish side that contains some of the most exciting football talent on the planet. “You know what I learned watching them [England] technically? They play at the same level as the team they’re playing against,” she says. “I do think they will rise to a level to give an incredibly competitive game against Spain … just because of the mental aptitude of the England team, of stepping up when the moment demands it.”
