Before turning to events in Turkey, a quick personal anecdote. A couple of weeks ago, I watched my nine-year-old nephew playing Sunday League. His team were facing a side a few divisions above them — a far more polished outfit with a cohort of stern-looking coaches in matching tracksuits — in a rainy cup game and were expected to get trounced.
Miraculously, they came from 3-1 down to earn a 3-3 draw, helped along the way when their opponents had a fourth goal ruled out for offside following a late flag from the flustered parent running the line.
Afterwards, it was my brother’s turn to pay the referee and, as we struggled with his banking app in the rain, two coaches from the opposition team approached the ref, fired up.
They “just wanted to clarify” the timing of the offside decision and “just wanted to check” the ref’s credentials, but their tone and body language were aggressive and the conversation felt charged. The referee, who can’t have been much older than 20, was obviously uncomfortable and the exchange was in danger of escalating when the coaches lost interest and walked away.
Really, it was unremarkable, a small show of intimidation towards a ref, likely on the tamer side of the hundreds of similar incidents which took place across the country on the same day, at every level and age group.
Anyone who plays or watches football regularly will have witnessed something like it. But what if the stakes had been higher? What if it had been the cup final? Would the two coaches have been so willing to let it go?
It is not especially hard to see how you get from, “I just want to clarify, mate…” to something much uglier, which brings us to Turkey.
All league football in the country has been suspended after referee Halil Umut Meler was punched in the head by Faruk Koca, president of top-tier club Ankaragucu, on the pitch following a Super Lig game at the weekend.
Koca was arrested, while Meler was left hospitalised in a neck brace.
While it was obviously an extreme incident, no-one who follows the game in this country or elsewhere should act particularly surprised.
Martin Cassidy of Ref Support UK has said the charity receives “reports of similar or worse incidents every single week”, while earlier this year hundreds of grassroots referees told the BBC they feared for their safety during matches — with some describing being punched, headbutted and spat at.
There is a pervasive culture across football of viewing referees as fair game for abuse, whether after an under-10s match or in the rarefied air of the Premier League.
Verbal abuse of officials across every level of the game is now normalised and justified by many supporters
Earlier this month, for example, Erling Haaland briefly became an internet meme for screaming maniacally in the face of referee Simon Hooper after Manchester City’s 3-3 draw with Tottenham. Seemingly unabashed, the City striker shared one of the memes on social media the following day.
Haaland was incensed that Hooper failed to play advantage as City looked for a stoppage-time winner in a game when the Norwegian twice squandered great opportunities to score. Naturally, it was Hooper’s mistake which Haaland and City supporters blamed for the dropped points.
Haaland is far from alone; high-profile players and managers across the elite game are guilty of targeting officials every week.
After the same match, City coach Pep Guardiola insisted he would not “do a Mikel Arteta comment”, referring to the Arsenal manager’s rant at officials following the defeat to Newcastle, while Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp is among those with a history of berating officials. Players, managers and the media and pundit class — who constantly obsess over refereeing decisions — have created an environment in which officials are held to impossibly high standards and routinely scapegoated.
This attitude has filtered through to fans and down the pyramid, to the point where verbal abuse of officials across every level of the game is now normalised and justified by many supporters because referees (like any human) occasionally make mistakes.
There is already a refereeing crisis at grassroots level, which is not in the least bit surprising. The ref in my nephew’s game was paid £20 and my brother bunged him an extra fiver for the rain and the hassle — probably not worth it in the long-run given the real risk of intimidation or worse.
This will have a knock-on effect in the elite game and there is a growing sense that standards are on the slide.
After all, who would want to be a ref?
There are steps that would help. The Premier League could ban managers from talking about refereeing decisions after matches or be tougher on players or coaches who cross a line.
Broadcasters could make a commitment to focus less on officials. Clubs could sanction players.
There appears to be little appetite for real change, however, perhaps because all the outrage and the drama, the endless discussion, is just too valuable to give up.
Hopefully, the crisis engulfing Turkish football will prove a wake-up call for the entire game and a turning point towards addressing the issue of abuse towards officials.
The incident, though, felt like an inevitable consequence of a culture which has taken hold of football and, without change, there will surely be more of these extreme incidents at the highest levels of the game too.
