First Buffon, now this. How long before abuse of the ref gets even more sinister?
I’vE not been assaulted for two years now,’ says Ryan Hampson, with a casual tolerance of the intolerable which offers a sobering insight into the kind of world football refereeing has become.
His indifference is what three years running matches in the Manchester leagues instils in you, even though Hampson admits that the Sunday morning clash between Manchester Rovers and the Debt Settlers at Hough End on the city’s southern approaches in the season before last took abuse to another level.
‘It was only me giving a free-kick they disagreed with,’ he says of an infringement against the Debt Settlers which saw him first accused of being a cheat, then hit in the face. ‘Maybe I should have abandoned the game there and then but I just got up, sent him off and carried on.’
The incident went to an FA disciplinary tribunal which found the abuse unproven. ‘You don’t get 40 camera angles in the Sunday leagues,’ the 19-year- old Level 5 referee reflects. ‘And no player wanted to come out and testify...’ Even with such impediments to justice, there were still 111 proven assaults on referees last year.
The abuse has kept on coming in the past week. Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon’s tirade against Michael Oliver for awarding Real Madrid a late penalty in their Champions League tie was a prelude to something infinitely more disturbing: vicious personal attacks on the official and his wife Lucy, who received abusive texts after her mobile number was posted online.
On Tuesday night, referee Peter Bankes found an Oldham Athletic fan sprinting across the Rochdale pitch towards him after a first-half penalty was awarded to the home side. The supporter slipped on his backside, allowing Oldham’s Anthony Gerrard to intervene.
Deeply moronic though the Oldham episode was, it’s the Buffon incident which has provoked most incredulity among the refereeing establishment. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has made the extraordinary observation to La Gazzetta
dello Sport that he ‘understands’ why Buffon felt so frustrated.
It is by no means guaranteed that the goalkeeper will be hit with a maximum four-match ban under Article 15 of UEFA rules for a relentless verbal attack in which Oliver was manhandled.
Though the Professional Game Match Officials organisation frown on their members passing comment, many in the fraternity feel that the remotest sentimental tolerance for Buffon will legitimise the same kind of ugly behaviour across the game.
‘It’s prototype behaviour. People copy what they see on television. We see it all the time,’ says Hampson. ‘First you see Oliver, then you see fans going at a referee at Oldham. It’s trickle-down.’
Sportsmail analyst Graham Poll argued the same point on these pages yesterday.
Oliver is thought to be putting the Madrid episode behind him, though the personal attacks on his family — police are investigating reports of disturbances and verbal abuse at their Northumberland home — are more difficult. ‘You don’t expect members of your family to get that,’ says Poll. ‘That affects you more.’
The threat to Bankes’ safety was also the product of local factors. There was even a hashtag for some Oldham fans’ plan to #takeoverthetown when they travelled seven miles north to Rochdale for their biggest game of the year, which also happened to be a relegation scrap. The away club asked for responsible behaviour but it didn’t help that Oldham forward Duckens Nazon told his Instagram followers: ‘Today is the WAR.’
Bankes, from Merseyside, is by no means the only referee to find the sanctity of the pitch breached this season, with incidents of disorder nearly three times the level of a decade ago, as clubs cut back on policing costs.
Sportsmail understands one referee found a spectator on a pitch wearing a satchel at one fixture during the campaign. ‘It was unclear what was in the bag and what kind of security threat that posed,’ says an official.
The same source describes inconsistency in different clubs’ approach to pitch encroachment, even at a high level of professional football. ‘ One club will say they have staff with football boots on, ready to give chase, others don’t.’
The absence of respect for officials is the bigger problem, though, and there is by no means consensus on how to instil it. A Championship official tells Sportsmail that a zero-tolerance approach to dissent is simply not viable.
‘If you went out and put up a yellow card every time someone said something to you it would be bedlam,’ he says. ‘You would just inflame it. There are other ways of dealing with it. We visit clubs far more, see players there, and explain the disciplinary system to them. There are more first name terms and if, as a player, you know someone, you are far more likely to hold back.’
Others fundamentally disagree. ‘I keep hearing the mantra that the first abusive comment should
be ignored and that respect is expected after that,’ says poll. ‘But what does that say about the way players can behave?
‘I watch football six levels below the professional game now and see match officials routinely abused every week. If Buffon can escape with impunity, isn’t that a green light for abuse everywhere?’
This is by no means only a British problem. Spain’s referees’ union received over 50 complaints of violent assaults on match officials in youth and amateur leagues in 2017 — three times more than in 2015 and 2016.
A young regional leagues referee, Christian Vera, was head-butted in one incident and police were called. An 18-year-old referee was kicked in the head and knocked out by a player he had just sent off for a violent challenge.
Hampson is an ambassador for an impressive new organisation, Ref Support UK, which is campaigning for greater respect and support for officials but it’s unclear how long he’ll be in the middle.
‘I’ll be running three cup finals before the end of the season but the game doesn’t excite me like it did,’ he says.
‘The abuse wears away at you. I can take it or leave it now. next season? I’m weighing up whether I want to go on.’