A&H

Idea to help with the current disciplinary issues

I

iamniallo

New Member
Hi All,

Long time no speak, unfortunately almost since I qualified Ive just suffered knee injury after knee injury to the point where I've not refereed for some time!

With that said, I post this idea with the best of intentions and hope you dont think this is a case of someone telling a chef how to boil an egg! I'm sure you have heard them all before and I am interested in your feedback on this. (I am making some assumptions that refereeing process hasnt changed too much in two years, so apologise for any incorrect assumptions)

The proposal is either....

At the end of each match, as part of the report the referee submits, they also submit a score on each team based on some criteria such as behaviour/dissent of the teams, manager/coaches and any team associated spectators. This could be done on a sliding scale similar to the score submitted by teams on the referees performance. If over x amount of weeks (or a season) a team receives a overall score of 5 or below from more than 1 referee they receive some form of punishment, be that points or a fine. I just feel that the knowledge that a referee could have this influence on a club could encourage a better approach to conduct

or

as per above........a team receives a overall score of 5 or below from more than 1 referee over the course of a season this then triggers a process in which a appointed FA rep randomly attends the teams games (incognito of course, not with an FA branded jacket on) and observes the team and then reports on their findings, and again an appropriate punishment is handed out based on the outcome of their findings.


Of course, with this idea it creates extra work for the referee in having to submit further information/report or requires further resource for people to actually assess the teams involved in the game. Its not a solution, just an idea to debate the merits of it as a possible course of action?
 
The Referee Store
I've quite often been asked to submit some combination of respect/sportsmanship marks as part of the post-game reporting. It's not particularly burdensome (certainly not when compared to other things I've been asked to report over the years!), but I don't know that it feels like it's ever had much effect on team behaviour.

It's quite rare for me as a referee to be sent to the same team more than once or twice a season, so I don't know if we're well placed to judge if player behaviour is changing, or to directly feel the benefit when it does. I could turn up to a team towards the end of a season and I have no way of knowing if their good behaviour is because they're always a nice team, or if they've received a series of 2's and 3's, your entire process has happened, they've been given a slap on the wrist and have improved as a result.

And vice-versa - if you give a team a low mark, you don't know if they're always like that and are going to get punished as a result, or if you just had a particularly bad day and all that's going to happen is it's their first and only black mark of the season.

So it means that as a referee, submitting these marks often just feels like screaming into a void.

I don't hate the idea at all, but as these processes generally take place without your further involvement, it often feels like all that's happening is someone types that number into a spreadsheet and then does nothing with it. For these processes to have a genuine positive effect of referee morale (and by extension, referee retention), we need to show them having some visible effect - which seems like exactly the opposite of the FA's usual approach of keeping referees away from post-game discipline where possible.
 
Thanks for your reply Graeme, I think you have raised some relevant points here.

It's quite rare for me as a referee to be sent to the same team more than once or twice a season, so I don't know if we're well placed to judge if player behaviour is changing, or to directly feel the benefit when it does.
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I would say that the idea of the process would be to judge the team on the day and not be influenced with "ahhh well they're usually good lads, occasion just got to them today, I'll let them off this time" so I would say thats a good thing.

Likewise I appreciate you may not benefit directly from the outcome of your rating, but the idea would be that someone else does. Of course this ties into your feelings of screaming into a void. You may go a whole season getting real stinkers, but someone, somewhere benefits from that. Issue is how do we make you feel the result of your feedback also? But you (I?) would like to think that the idea of process would mean you would have some real bad luck not to benefit from someone elses feedback in your experience as overall the idea would be to change attitudes and behaviour

I could turn up to a team towards the end of a season and I have no way of knowing if their good behaviour is because they're always a nice team, or if they've received a series of 2's and 3's, your entire process has happened, they've been given a slap on the wrist and have improved as a result.
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I mean, this sounds like a positive to me :) it would probably not be the best to publish the scores in advance as it could effect your mentality going into the game if you have a team of 2,3's all season!


And vice-versa - if you give a team a low mark, you don't know if they're always like that and are going to get punished as a result, or if you just had a particularly bad day and all that's going to happen is it's their first and only black mark of the season.
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True, but again its a little catch 22. As if they do get the mark, its almost like a pre-emptive warning, that conduct was not acceptable and they buck their ideas up? then they arent a problem again. Not the best experience for you but overall feels like a winner.
 
It's an idea that definitely has merits, as far as most teams are concerned there really isn't any consequence to being abusive to the referee.

I'm not sure if the FA is really interested in fixing the problem, or just hoping that it doesn't get too bad and they can keep running things as normal.
 
All fair comments.

The overall point remains though - without seeing the effect, all this is is just admin for no visible benefit. And if the purpose is to aid referee retention and recruitment, then "visible effect" should arguably be one of the driving forces.

Like I said, I've been refereeing for 9 years, across 3 counties and multiple leagues within each county. As far as I can recall, every league asks for respect and/or sportsmanship marks. I can't once think of a specific example where I've heard of anything other than a meaningless cup awarded to the "most sporting/respectful team", and we're still where we are now in terms of referee assaults, rising rates of referees leaving the game and diminishing recruitment. If your proposed system doesn't also include a way to show referees that they're being listened to, I'm afraid I don't think it adds much over the token gestures that are already in place in most leagues.
 
The overall point remains though - without seeing the effect, all this is is just admin for no visible benefit. And if the purpose is to aid referee retention and recruitment, then "visible effect" should arguably be one of the driving forces.
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I would say the overriding visible benefit would be that you would see yourself dishing out less lower mark scores and have an easier time with behaviour and dissent aimed towards yourself.

If this ran for a season and you got to the end and you had consistently fedback low marks, not noticed any reduction in poor behaviour, it would definitely call into question any real benefit to the additional effort
 
One way to spin it as a positive would be to use the best season score to give access to a comp - like the fair play Uefa thing (?).

At our grassroots we have something like 15 promotion places from tier 6 to 5 coming from 9 divisions just in this region. It would be quite easy to give one place to the team that topped the “fair play” chart.

As a referee I would love to mark teams on a simple scale. Captains mark us on 4 dimensions plus overall and give comments after every match - and we have no voice - crazy. I’ m in!
 
santa sangria said:
One way to spin it as a positive would be to use the best season score to give access to a comp - like the fair play Uefa thing (?).

At our grassroots we have something like 15 promotion places from tier 6 to 5 coming from 9 divisions just in this region. It would be quite easy to give one place to the team that topped the “fair play” chart.

As a referee I would love to mark teams on a simple scale. Captains mark us on 4 dimensions plus overall and give comments after every match - and we have no voice - crazy. I’ m in!
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i think this is actually a really good suggestion, in steps 3 to 7 in England where promotion can be really hard to achieve (even more so step 5 to 4 where there's only one guaranteed promotion spot per step 5 division I think)

giving a playoff place to teams top of the fair play league might be a really good incentive (for some)
 
The league that I am involved with brought in a fair play system a few years ago. After every game the referee and the opposition give both teams / their opposition a sporting play rating out of 10. At the end of every season the team in each division that tops the sporting play league gets their affiliation fee for the following season paid.
 
RustyRef said:
The league that I am involved with brought in a fair play system a few years ago. After every game the referee and the opposition give both teams / their opposition a sporting play rating out of 10. At the end of every season the team in each division that tops the sporting play league gets their affiliation fee for the following season paid.
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But did it improve anything for you in refereeing the games?

Its very selfless of you all to have brought this conversation round on how it could benefit others, but I must admit the focus of my idea was on how to improve things for you all!
 
iamniallo said:
But did it improve anything for you in refereeing the games?

Its very selfless of you all to have brought this conversation round on how it could benefit others, but I must admit the focus of my idea was on how to improve things for you all!
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I don't referee on the league, but yes it was well received by the clubs and did seem to bring in an improvement in behaviour.

I would also say that anything that improves the behaviour of clubs and players by definition improves things for referees.
 
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