Ian Nockolds: “Well, I’m delighted to welcome Martin Cassidy the Chief Executive of Ref Support to the Toolstation Weston League Podcast and Martin before we go in to the guts of the interview can you tell us a bit about what Ref Support is?”
Martin Cassidy: “Hi Ian, well Ref Support UK are the first registered referee charity in the world and we were created by referees and Trustees who have, funnily enough, all officiated on the Weston League for some time and we wanted to create something to give referees independent support away from the FA. We don’t receive any funding off the FA or any governing body so we can have our own independence so we can challenge the FA on what we want to improve about referee training both on and off the field of play”.
IN: “In the terms of the structure of the pyramid, what levels do you support referees at?”
MC: “Well, we offer our support to any referee across the country, particularly referees who want to remain anonymous. We have referees at professional level who contact us for advice and support, but we like to concentrate on grassroots level, so we can coach or mentor referees right up to Level 2B, which is the Conference North and South level, right down to grassroots level for people who have just taken their referee exam.”
IN: “So obviously, you re taking an interest in the Weston League as a league, when you look at the standard of officiating and perhaps the treatment of match officials in the Weston League at the moment, how do you access the health of the game?”
MC: “Well, the health of the game nationally is problematic, it’s not just confined to the Weston League, but we do work with other leagues, because we are south west based and started in the south west, and like I said, all our Trustees have worked on the Weston League. Combined we have done about 100 years on the Weston League, people like Richard Mellon, people will know Richard Mellon, Dave Bamber, obviously myself and Jamie Frampton, who was one of the first women to referee on the Weston League alongside a legend lady called Wendy Toms. So we think the Weston League just reflects everywhere else. They only thing we think is absolutely brilliant about the Weston League is how they have addressed the support for referees. They were the first league in the country to approach us for some independent help and support, because we won’t just take the referees side. We do offer consultancies to football clubs on things like match reports from referees, about the performance, dismissals and yellow cards and EOY’s which are extraordinary incidents reports, which any referee might send in. Now we have said this before on record that we are never going to say that every referee is perfect for the level they operate at. Some referees react too quickly, some referees haven’t have the soft skills training on how to deal with confrontation and challenging conversations, and those skills are not taught by the FA at grassroots level and we believe that concentrating on those first and getting soft skills to a level that can improve your communication with players and club officials really, really helps and that’s something that we really want to concentrate on.”
IN: “So when you talk about support, is your primary function really to help develop a match official’s skills, you know their knowledge of the game, and perhaps how they manage players and manage situations with managers, you know that sort of thing.”
MC: “All of it really, you know, referees at particularly Weston League level and the assistant referees they should be fully compliant with law, they should know that if they are not up to speed with all the practices and law amendments they shouldn’t be operating at that level, frankly, and I know some changes have come in recently, particularly with the Weston League with sin-bins that are a challenge to the referee and there is no doubt about that. We cogitate on everything, you know, and people contact us in confidence and others want us to go public with things that have happened to them, some that we talk to probably we’ll tell them that may be they could have prevented that. With our association with the Weston League and particularly some of the managers about, some of these guys that are now managers and Chairmen of football clubs, we refereed. So when we go to clubs we have got a good connection with an awful lot of these clubs, so a lot are really honest and open with us. They tell us how they feel and what they think of the referee, both positive and negative. And one thing that is clear is that a lot of managers have a personality change when they are on the field of play, it depends on the result of the game, on their perception of the performance of the match officials. We can sit and down with loads of referees in the Weston League and with managers as well and have a pint and a chat and everything is fine if stood away from the game. The Weston League Conference is a really good example of that. I know we all come down there and having some pint with a Chairman and managers and players and people realize that we are fans of the game and we are not just this necessary evil of the game.”
IN: “I follow you on Twitter as I am sure many clubs and fans of the Weston League will as well and I notice that obviously you have been very keen to counteract criticism of match officials, certainly in recent weeks you have probably been doing it for some time in fairness. When it comes to the criticism of match officials are you more concerned about the players or how the managers perhaps are interacting with match officials or are you most concerned with how fans are treating match officials from the side-lines?”
MC: “I think it is all the above. I think it is absolutely all the above and I think we have made concerted efforts to address online of abuse. You have only got to see what happened recently in the national news on addressing online of abuse and why should referees as individuals be an exception and it’s been really interesting this say last week or so, as there have been people I have seen on Twitter who are abusing referees almost weekly. Some of it will be soft abuse like, blaming him on pole, he might have missed the penalty, it never should have been a red, some will be more personal and have resulted in reports and but then these same people are Tweeting how terrible it is that people are committing suicide because of online abuse. Now the hypocrisy of that is breathtaking. So that is the first point I want to be able to make on that. But the reason we have done it is we feel that clubs, players and managers have got away with it for too long and are just venting their spleen on Twitter and no one is going to answer them back. The FA never answer them back, referees are told not to have social media accounts at Premier League level and at grassroots level they are encouraged not to comment on their particular match and that’s very frustrating, particularly when we have been to a match and we have watched the referee have a good game, even had an excellent game, might have missed something, but these referees they are absolutely castigated for making mistakes like a dodgy off-side, a dodgy fixed penalty, but no one says anything about the player that makes an own goal, that gets a stupid second yellow, the player that already has a yellow and goes and says something stupid to the referee. So the hypocrisy of some of the Twitter accounts is that they won’t say anything to their own players but straightaway they’ll jump right on the referees back. A really good example is was last week in the Forest / West Brom game, and we even had a Twitter exchange with Lee Westwood, the famous golfer, because he was naming and shaming the referee, calling him all the names under the sun you know, and I hadn’t looked at it and people were saying to me, oh you haven’t seen the game how can you comment. But we will comment on the abuse, the validity that just because people think the referee has had a bad game that we can go out and absolutely slaughter him. Now when I looked at that game the Forest / West Brom game, Forest lost possession down one end and it should have been a free kick and everyone knows now it should have been a free kick. The referee never gave a free kick, the ball went out the other end, Forest scored, Forest went mad, but no one said anything and that goal was an own goal. All they concentrated on was that one mistake by the referee, which was he missed a free kick. The ball went through the mid-field, through the defence, went wide, crossed the box and they made an own goal. Now, isn’t that ridiculous isn’t it to think that three phases of play resulted in an own goal, but let’s forget about that, let’s blame the ref. And it’s these sorts of things that we think about and we can’t leave them unaddressed and we’ve done a blog on our website refsupport.co.uk about the connection between crime and referee abuse. And we say in Liverpool, where I was born, people might find this stereotypical, but the kids used to steal the signs off the back of a car, you know the Beastie Boys used to have a Volkswagen sign around their necks and people used to copy that and they had various signs and put them on their bedroom doors and then these people would get in the boot of the car and try and take the tools out and then they would take the radio by getting in the door and eventually they would take the car, have a car crash and someone gets seriously injured and if we take that back to the referee abuse we think that the taking of the sign is the online abuse, the taking of the tools is these comments on the field of play, the taking the radio is the comments in the bar, and the taking of the car and the car crash is when the ref gets physically assaulted. So our strategy is like what you do with crime is when you address it early on in the process it’s probably not going to escalate and people will be a bit more aware of what the problem is and that’s why we do it.”
IN: “Football is a game of opinions isn’t it? That’s one of the secrets of the games success and at the Weston League level albeit the fans aren’t paying a lot of money to go and watch, they are paying five quid to go in so they are going to be entitled to their opinion. A lot of what we are talking about is reflecting on the fact referees and assistant referees are human beings. So from your perspective and also from the perspective of a trainer, you are dealing with referees to cope with the situation that they find themselves in stadium where there might be one or two hundred people and they might be having a bad day at the office, decisions might not be going their way. What would be your message to the fans and perhaps even more broadly to the managers and the players as well about how they should manage their criticism and their engagement with the match officials?”
MC: “Well the first line of what you just said in your question is the one I have the biggest problem with, it’s this entitlement. They think because I paid this money I’m entitled to vent my spleen. And quite frankly that’s ridiculous. You don’t pay to have the right to abuse any individual anyway. You wouldn’t get anyone saying I’ve just bought a can of beans from Tesco’s therefore I am going to abuse the person at the check-out or the people that stack shelves, so why would it be any more appropriate to do that in a football environment. So that’s the first point I would like to make there. One of the things we have noticed about the Weston League particularly is that the vast majority of clubs are absolutely incredible, are brilliant and we love engaging with them. Well there are some that are really just off the scale as to how they operate, and I wouldn’t like to name them, but I think if you looked at your misconduct chart it wouldn’t be too hard to find out who they are and it’s almost a default setting, when something goes wrong or we lose it’s the referees fault. We were also looking at making t-shirts with “All My Fault On” or have a t-shirt “Why Always Me”. This has been going on for ages, it’s ridiculous and then they are saying ‘oh we can’t get a crowd in’. Do you think they really want to pay something to go in to the crowds and any of the managers braving the freeze for ninety minutes and to hear the players f’ing and blinding. Is that really conducive to attracting spectators to your stadium?”
IN: “One of the things I have sort of been looking at for the Men’s eleven aside game which I think is underpinning some of the restructuring and that the FA and looking at doing at steps 5 and 6 is the decline in numbers of men playing Saturday afternoon eleven aside football. Is that trend mirrored in match officials are you seeing fewer people coming forward to officiate than before?”
MC: “Yes and no. You see one of the problems from a referee’s perspective is the demands upon the referee, players you can hear moaning about how many games they’ve got to play, but no one thought about the referee. For instance, Martin Atkinson, did something like, I think it was nine games over two weeks, some with AR or fourth divisionals and all that, but it’s the commitment to the game that happens and what you find is at Weston League level that referees at that level will ‘close dates’ they call it. If you don’t close that date the FA can call on your quite late. So that can affect their personal lives, sometimes the expectations of the FA are unfair on match officials. They expect them to be at their beck and call. So that’s one problem at Weston League level, which is a great level of football and people should aspire to operate at it, but they can’t commit to it, they can’t. We’ve heard of the FA sending out letters saying ‘oh you know, not many of you are available in August’. Well August is the holiday season and the south-west’s major industry is tourism, so these referees might work in that. So there’s lots of permutations of referees availability but we would say at Weston League level, particularly I think, there are mechanisms to support referees properly. We’re holding this Managers Forum again, that’s on Sunday 2nd March, which is all about engaging with managers and players as well as referees and getting to understand not only what a referees expectation is of a club and a team, it’s the teams expectation of match officials and again I’d be naive to say that sometimes the standard of the officials at Weston League level hasn’t fell below par, I’d be naive to say it hasn’t , obviously it does, but we just want to be able to increase the chances of everyone having a positive experience of football at Weston League level including the players and including the ref.”
IN: “One of the FA’s restructuring processes is going to see the footprint of the Weston League expanding further down in to the south-west, down in to Cornwall next season. Does that represent a challenge for match officials as well in terms of how officials will be selected for games next season?”
MC: “I think it’s two-fold, it depends on how the FA structures this as to the geographical area. The Weston League has a fixed fee to help clubs, which it thinks is a good idea, everyone knows what the fixed fees are each week, as clubs have likely complained that match fees are much more than the gate income. So we think of fixed fee as a positive; however, you could have people travelling from Bristol all the way down to Plymouth on a fixed fee that they might not think is adequate for the expenses of the day. Now, again going back to what we said earlier about the expectations of referees, they are expected to get to the game an hour and a half before kick-off, so if you are travelling down from Bristol to Plymouth, you are gone for most of the day and you’ve only got a set fee and then the assistant referee is expected to travel with the referee to help the clubs expenses, so the assistant referee will be out all day and won’t get back until seven or eight o’clock at night and get £35 for it. So there are all these little things in there that are going to affect this. But also referees will choose how far they should go, which should be so, it is the same as players when they travel so far that there should be a limit on it and I think referees will probably say here are the clubs that I can travel to. Now that in itself creates problems because you are going to the same clubs, you might be too familiar with them. That can go both ways. If they can be having a great game and they are going to be happy to see you, if you had a couple of poor games they will turn to the captain and give a couple of penalties against them so they won’t be too happy to see you. So there are lots of different problems that are going to occur here. From our point of view as a charity it won’t affect us, we have lots of people all over the south-west who can help clubs. We’ve been down to Bristol Parkway when they won one of ours recently, which was not only a great result for the club but also for the league. So geographically to us it doesn’t really matter, because we have such a huge group, but from the referees point of view there are going to be challenges that they might not be used to. Also, all clubs should be aware of this, and if not they should look at it, some of them complain about the standards of referring now in the Premier Division, that’s now going to drop down a level, to what’s known as level 4, so level 4’s currently do Weston League First Division only in regards to the Weston League, but now they are doing the Premier. Now the knock-on effect of that is ‘a’ numbers, there is going to have to be a significant increase in the number of level 4’s, but more importantly the standard of the assistant referee now drops to a level 5, 6 and may be level 7 referees doing the line. So the referee in fairness to him is being very proactive about this and offering training out to assistant referees and to referees to ensure they are ready for these changes, which we think are positive.”
IN: “So obviously with more pressure on the match officials it will be even more important to get people interested in this side of the game isn’t it and I think one of the things, one of the wonderful things about grassroots football it provides people with a love of football the opportunity to get involved with a number of different areas, whether they are volunteering at their club, or whether they are doing the media side of things like I do. But obviously from your perspective you are keen on encouraging people to become match officials and to take that side of the game up as well. So if there are people out there who have considered becoming a match official, but perhaps have been a little put off by the treatment they have seen at some games what would your message to those people be?”
MC: “Take it up, absolutely take it up. We are about as well to help people engage. There are some great county FA’s in the region and county FA who could help referees more, but like I said right at the beginning of this interview, the Trustees we have been friends for 20, 30 years, in refereeing you make some brilliant friendships. I can go in to the pubs in Bristol and bump in to a player or manager and have a pint and you can make some wonderful, wonderful, wonderful long-term friendships, the husbands, the wives, girlfriends by being a referee and I would advise anybody to get off of their Playstation, to get out of their room, to get off the couch and get out and take a referees course. It’s a great way to increase social engagement and again your soft skills and just to meet people who are footballs lovers like you are. Please to the FA which is something they don’t do, they don’t make people aware when they take the referees course that there is a problem with the abuse and I believe that if the FA doesn’t look at that a bit more realistically and look at it in a holistic way to say you are going to get some stuff said to you that you won’t like but this is the minority. However, what we have seen is there has been an increase of this level of abuse and that’s what we’re trying to address and I just think with the right level of support I think everyone will, more referees will engage, therefore we will have more referees to pick from, the standards will increase, players should be more happy with that and everybody wins. And I just think that it’s everyone’s responsibility, referees as well to address the levels of abuse that appears to be growing at every level of the game.”
IN: “And Martin, thank you very much for your time. We could talk all day I am sure, but it has been fantastic to hear your perspective and also the wonderful work that Ref Support do, so please keep up that excellent work.”
MC: “Well thank you for giving us the time again. It’s great that people engage with us and let people know that we are here to help clubs as well as referees and are happy to do so, all free of charge. So thank you Ian and thank you to the Weston League.”
