YOU’RE OFF!
...for threatening to break my legs – which is why 2,000 amateur refs like Ryan are on strike today. And it’s not the players he’s giving the red card to – it’s their PARENTS screaming vile abuse from the touchline
MARTYN Pritchard was just 18 when he was confronted by thugs who threatened to break his legs. The extraordinary thing was this – Martyn was the referee in a game of children’s football. And the threats of violence came from a couple of the dads.
He was in charge of a football match involving 11-year-olds played not in some uncompromising corner of an inner city, but in a neatly maintained park in one of the more salubrious parts of Bournemouth.
‘A few of the parents for one of the sides felt some of my decisions were awful, which is pretty normal,’ Martyn recalls. ‘At half-time, I was confronted by a couple of the dads and threatened with having my legs broken and being put into hospital. I tried to remain calm in the situation, tried getting their names, but then it turned nasty.’
The teenager attempted to calm things down, but realised he was in serious danger of being further assaulted. ‘So I abandoned the game,’ he says.
‘Afterwards I wrote a report and submitted it to the relevant authority. But nothing happened after that. I felt there was no protection from the local FA so decided to give it up at the end of that season.’ He has not refereed a game since.
Martyn is not alone. A report compiled by Loughborough University revealed that, in 2015, 60 per cent of grassroots referees had experienced verbal abuse and 19 per cent had been physically assaulted.
And the problem is reaching a critical point. Of the 27,000 qualified referees in England, FA figures suggest that as many as 3,000 each season are provoked by the relentless, corrosive abuse into hanging up their whistle.
That means at the current rate of attrition there will be no refs left within a decade.
This weekend, up to 2,000 grassroots amateur league games will be postponed because of a nationwide referees’ strike organised by Ryan Hampson, an 18-year-old amateur referee from Manchester.
‘It snowballed,’ Hampson says of his campaign. ‘I’ve had thousands of messages, from all over.
‘Sadly it seems referees are being assaulted everywhere.’
And all too often, the perpetrators are parents, the people who should be setting an example – as Holly Warmington knows only too well.
Another young referee, she had loved her weekend mornings refereeing junior games in the local park, and relished the involvement. The young players were great to deal with. There were no issues, no arguing, no problem: they just enjoyed playing football.
But one Sunday when she had just turned 17, Holly refereed an under-12 game near her home in Tonbridge, Kent. During a minor skirmish, one of the players fouled another. She awarded a free kick and the game continued, she thought, without further issue. It was only afterwards that she realised not everyone agreed.
‘As I was shaking hands with the last of the players, I saw this man striding across the pitch in my direction,’ she recalls. ‘It turned out he was the father of the boy who had been fouled. He was very aggressive, poking me in the chest and telling me I was a moron, that I didn’t understand the rules, that I was a cheat. These were 11-yearolds and he was behaving like it was a Premier League game.’ Nobody came to her aid. ‘I was terrified. He got more and more aggressive. I’m 5ft 5in tall and he felt a good foot taller than me. It was really intimidating.
‘He was hurting me. I was in tears. Eventually he moved away, swearing at me, telling me he’d make sure I never reffed again.’
Holly alerted the local FA to his behaviour, detailing his assault in her match report. She assumed he would be given some sort of sanction. She was wrong.
‘About a month later I had to referee the same under-12 team,’ she recalls. ‘And there he was, the parent who had assaulted me, standing on the touchline.
‘He pointed at me and mimed, “I’m watching you”. He had abused
‘I ran, and locked myself in the dressing room’
me in a really aggressive manner and there had been no repercussion. Despite my report, he had faced no punishment, nor had his club. It was that that made me think it wasn’t worth it.
‘You get assaulted and nothing happens. Everyone carries on as if it’s not important. I haven’t refereed a game since. It forced me to give up something I loved. I’d had enough.’
For Ryan Hampson, the final straw came just before Christmas. After awarding a free kick during an adult match he was refereeing in Manchester, he was spat at, kicked and punched by players, coaches and spectators alike.
At the final whistle he ran to the dressing room and locked himself in. An hour after the game had ended, as he sat there terrified, an envelope was pushed under the door. In it was his match fee: £30.
‘I’m getting 30 quid for being treated like a human punch bag,’ he says. ‘I’d had enough.’
The moment he got home, he set up a Facebook page mooting the idea of a strike. Immediately, from across the country came back stories of similar abuse, stories so frequent as to be commonplace.
‘People seem to think because we’re the ref, we should get used to it,’ Ryan adds.
‘But at what point did we sign on any dotted line to be abused? No one would be considering strike action unless things had reached a very bad place.’
Drop in to watch any park match and you will quickly get a sense of what he means. The referee has become the focus for vituperation, hounded and pilloried, assaulted, spat on and, as Ryan himself experienced, chased from the pitch by those intent on inflicting harm.
‘In my opinion, when it comes to football the whole mindset changes,’ he says.
‘There are things people just would never dream of saying to someone at work or in the street. But the moment they walk over the white line, football people think that sort of abuse is acceptable.’
Research suggests attacks are as likely to occur in leafy southern suburbs as northern inner cities.
Earlier this season, a match in Gloucester was abandoned when a player knocked out the referee. In 2016, more than 100 serious assaults on match officials were reported to police. In my time coaching junior football I have seen referees spat at, abused, even on one chilling occasion, chased to their car by a posse of inflamed parents and players. According to top referee Keith Hackett, the former head of the Professional Game Match Officials Board, the dangers for those refereeing at the bottom of the football pyramid have never been so pronounced. ‘I have been in the game since 1960 and there’s no question things have got much tougher at grassroots level,’ he says. ‘I started in a world relatively respectful to law and order and when there weren’t any parents at junior matches. Now you can have 30 or 40 parents who are all screaming at the referee, blaming him for their team’s shortcomings.’
Ryan Hampson insists the purpose of his strike is simple: to draw attention to the lack of support referees receive from the authorities. He was called to a meeting at the FA soon after he had announced his action, but walked out of it more determined to press on.
‘The FA weren’t prepared to discuss the strike or listen to what we had to say,’ he says. ‘They just thought because I was young they could head me off at the pass.
‘The FA aren’t doing enough to protect me. They say they want me to report incidents, but then when I do they don’t do anything.
‘There are repeat offenders out there. I know a lad who has been
‘FA doesn’t protect us... we need body cameras’
banned three times this season alone for abuse. He ignores it and carries on playing.
‘We need three things: body cameras, longer bans and referee assault to be classified as a hate crime. Because that is what it is. It’s a hate crime.’
A spokesman for the FA insists that the body takes referee safety seriously, that it is working to protect officials and that it can only act if abuse is reported.
After an absence of nearly a year since the last one was made redundant in a cost-cutting purge, the organisation has just appointed a new co-ordinator for its Respect Campaign, charged with increasing the support available to grassroots officials.
Keith Hackett does not share Hampson’s insistence that a strike is the answer, but agrees refereeing is in crisis.
‘Physical assault should invariably be a police matter,’ he says. ‘And the FA have got to look at punishment. Sanctions need to be higher on clubs.
‘Anyone found to have assaulted a ref should be banned for life and their club kicked out of the league they are in. Action has to be taken before we lose all our referees.’