The Ref Stop

The FA launch survey on coloured referee shirts

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Tealeaf

Tealeaf

Lighting the darkest hour
Staff member
Received the following from my RDO this morning:

Coloured Referee Shirts

David Elleray (Chairman of The FA Referees Committee) is asking for your opinions around changing the FA Rules & Regulations in regards to grassroots referees wearing coloured referee shirts. As you will be aware, currently this is not allowed, however The FA Referees’ Committee has been asked by the National Game Board to consider changing the FA Referee Regulations to allow referees to wear coloured shirts, primarily because of the proliferation of dark blue/black playing kits which CFAs are increasingly permitting teams to wear or are coming under growing pressure to allow.

In order to get all of your opinions in the most efficient way, I have set up a questionnaire. If you could take the time to answer the 4 questions based around this topic, it would be greatly appreciated, and I will be in a position to feedback your opinions to The FA Referees’ Committee to enable them to make a decision. The questionnaire can be found here:https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3SYWK78
 
The Ref Stop
Answered the questionnaire.

No way is anything coming out of my pocket, it's expensive enough already.
 
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Northants FA RDO is going to wondering why they get more responses to the survey than they have registered referees ..!
 
RustyRef said:
Northants FA RDO is going to wondering why they get more responses to the survey than they have registered referees ..!
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In fairness these guys did it first, and the third to last line was the reason I shared it :)
Questionaire capture.JPG
 
Survey questions deliberately set to ensure a negative result........

Which is a shame because it's really about time referees came out of the dark ages, stopped being so skin flint, and just accepted that your fees are actually supposed to be used to purchase equipment etc, as well as upkeep, rather than designed to make you a profit.
 
Padfoot said:
Survey questions deliberately set to ensure a negative result........

Which is a shame because it's really about time referees came out of the dark ages, stopped being so skin flint, and just accepted that your fees are actually supposed to be used to purchase equipment etc, as well as upkeep, rather than designed to make you a profit.
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Ha! Suuuure, that's an attitude that will attract new referees and keep them involved...

I purchase tonnes of equipment to referee. I'm sure most people on here do. I'm not going to break it down again, but it's not unreasonable to expect a referee to have to spend £200-£250 to properly equip themselves before they even step out on a pitch for the first time, probably approaching £300 if you include a course fee and registration. Around here, that's around 8-10 match fees, and I know from previous threads that I referee in one of the better paid areas of England.

I genuinely think that if that cost (and the related time investment of 8-10 sessions of something you don't yet know if you'll enjoy or not!) was made clear to a new referee up front, you'd lose a huge percentage of potentially promising applicants before they even tried it. And you want to increase that initial cost by £50/£100 for another shirt or two for....what benefit exactly?
 
Trip said:
The elephant in the room is that the official referee shirts are at least 6 times more expensive than they need to be. You can buy perfectly good non official referee shirts (adidas for example) for less than £10.
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There is a free text field in the questionnaire where I made this point. The Scottish FA used to have a deal whereby the "official" kits were discounted. I'm in favour of it personally - if it goes ahead it will bring us in line with the other 3 UK FAs, and to be perfectly honest, the explosion of black or very dark kits being worn by teams cannot be contained any longer. The horse has bolted because of a lack of enforcement.
 
What is meant by "official" kits?

I'm not trying to provoke an argument here, just wondering if I'm missing something?

On completion of my course, I bought this for a tenner: http://www.the-rashop.org/sale/29-premium-short-sleeve-black-collar-shirt-only.html and have been using it since. Because I've been a good boy this year, and taken to this refereeing lark, I'm hoping that Santa may bring me one tomorrow, with my county badge on.

If we do go down the coloured shirt route, I'd probably lash out and get myself a grey & yellow one of these: http://amzn.to/2iouGwB
 
Trip said:
There is only one referee kit endorsed by the FA and it changes every couple of years. You can only buy it from a single supplier. The current one is here: http://www.referee-equipment.co.uk/Catalogue/Referee-Kit/Nike-2016-Kit

You don't have to wear the official kit but if you get a cup final, even at grassroots level, they will probably expect all three officials to be wearing the same kit.
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I've done grassroots finals, never had to be in the same kit. If they do they'd better supply it.
 
I agree with @GraemeS the combination of introduction evening and course are expensive enough, with kit on top of that it could be prohibitive to some picking up the whistle.

It's all well and good saying that the first 10 games should cover this, but not everyone is in a position to fork out that kind of money and wait for it to trickle back in over a couple of months.

Now, I am lucky that I am currently in a position where if this were bought in I could afford a couple of new shirts, and I am all in favour of being allowed to wear colours other than black.

But there needs to be some changes for it to be workable.

1. They would need to gauruntee that the colours we can wear would not change for X number of years.
2. They would need to restrict the kits we can wear, so everyone has the same coloured kits. Everyone wearing Nike for example.
3. If they said all grass roots referees had to wear nike, then there'd need to be a discount on kits, perhaps 30% of shirt and embroidere when ordered through your county.
4. To avoid the above say grass roots referees could wear a cheaper make of kit, but this would present problems when people move up the pyramid and need to buy different kits.
 
Trip said:
There is only one referee kit endorsed by the FA and it changes every couple of years. You can only buy it from a single supplier. The current one is here: http://www.referee-equipment.co.uk/Catalogue/Referee-Kit/Nike-2016-Kit

You don't have to wear the official kit but if you get a cup final, even at grassroots level, they will probably expect all three officials to be wearing the same kit.
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There are a few suppliers of the Nike kit. It is not "endorsed" by The FA. It's just that everyone wants to look like the tv referees when they step out on their local park. It's all about managing the expectations of the players.

#allthegearandnoidea
 
zarathustra said:
I agree with @GraemeS the combination of introduction evening and course are expensive enough, with kit on top of that it could be prohibitive to some picking up the whistle.

It's all well and good saying that the first 10 games should cover this, but not everyone is in a position to fork out that kind of money and wait for it to trickle back in over a couple of months.

Now, I am lucky that I am currently in a position where if this were bought in I could afford a couple of new shirts, and I am all in favour of being allowed to wear colours other than black.

But there needs to be some changes for it to be workable.

1. They would need to gauruntee that the colours we can wear would not change for X number of years.
2. They would need to restrict the kits we can wear, so everyone has the same coloured kits. Everyone wearing Nike for example.
3. If they said all grass roots referees had to wear nike, then there'd need to be a discount on kits, perhaps 30% of shirt and embroidere when ordered through your county.
4. To avoid the above say grass roots referees could wear a cheaper make of kit, but this would present problems when people move up the pyramid and need to buy different kits.
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Also if a referee decides refereeing isn't for them, they've shelled out a lot of money for sod all
 
zarathustra said:
2. They would need to restrict the kits we can wear, so everyone has the same coloured kits. Everyone wearing Nike for example.
.
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But as soon as you do that it creates a monopoly and prices go up.

At the moment, it seems I can spend circa £60 for Nike kit, or a tenner for a perfectly good, unbranded kit.
 
RefJef said:
But as soon as you do that it creates a monopoly and prices go up.

At the moment, it seems I can spend circa £60 for Nike kit, or a tenner for a perfectly good, unbranded kit.
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True, I'm running the line on a league cup final at the end of Jan.

This season we can only wear black, with some white styling, so regardless of the brand we will all look similar enough that it wouldn't make any difference, black is black.

But if we could wear yellow shirts, the Yellow on the new nike shirts is different on the new shirts to the previous ones, and the Adidas shirts are different again etc.

While different shades or tones of yellow wouldn't make a difference to the teams ability to officiate match, it does look untidy and just not very professional.
 
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