There was a time when one of the most fundamental statements that could be made about football was that ‘the referee’s decision is final’. These five simple words sat deep at the heart of the way in which the game was played. Decisions may be right, decisions may be wrong, but once the referee has made a decision, that’s the only one that matters. 

By Ian King

We are a long way from those days, and if we’re pausing to wonder why and how this should have happened, we can only look upon an entire game which has become too self-important for decisions to be right or wrong and which has distorted itself beyond recognition in order to accommodate this way of thinking.

But in recent years, we have even contrived to find a way to go beyond that and into the realms of full-blown conspiracy theory. The matter of the referee’s decision being final was fatally undermined by the attitudes of managers, players and in many cases the media long ago. We’ve moved from refusing to accept that refereeing can get things wrong to arguing that they’re making bad decisions when they’re not. 

It is, frankly, astonishing that there is much of a debate going on over whether William Saliba should have been sent off during the match between Bournemouth and Arsenal on Saturday. There is no question that it was a foul. This sort of tactical foul, halting a break in the belief that a yellow card will be worth it, has been going on for years, and honestly Saliba was sold an absolute pup of a pass by Leandro Trossard. 

Ben White was a good thirty yards from the ball, and was not realistically going to get back and track across. Evanilson was denied a clear goalscoring opportunity. It’s right there in front of anybody who looks at it, no matter how many arrows get drawn across carefully selected stills from the video footage. 

The same could be said for David Raya’s foul on the same player for the penalty kick that sealed Bournemouth’s win. You can watch Raya clatter into Evanilson from multiple different angles in slow motion, should you wish. Even Mikel Arteta was relatively subdued about that particular incident after the match, considering his outspokenness on this matter. 

If anything, the one thing that these two pivotal moments in this match had in common was Arsenal sloppiness. If their supporters do want to get angry over this, then perhaps they should be getting angry at Leandro Trossard, whose wildly careless pass left Saliba with little alternative but to pull Evanilson back, or at Jakub Kiwior, whose wayward backpass played Evanilson in for the penalty. 

But in a world in which practically everybody seems to be increasingly only seeing what they choose to see, perhaps it’s inevitable that any argument between something which may cause some criticism of a football team and a grand conspiracy to – for some reason – deny this particular football team refereeing decisions in full view of the entire world will favour the latter rather than the former. We live in the age of ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories. Why should football be exempt from this? 

This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Arsenal, of course. The line over opinion on Manchester City’s 115 charges is sharply drawn between fans of clubs who want to spend whatever they like in order to buy success and everybody else. The same might be said for the controversial ownership of Newcastle United. And of course, as soon as Everton and Nottingham Forest were undone by their own financial incontinence and received points deductions last season, it was the Premier League itself which came under fire for being ‘corrupt’ rather than the owners of the clubs for running themselves so financially incompetently that they ended up in this position in the first place. The idea that there is a “Red Mafia” controlling English football has become commonplace. 

But the refereeing conspiracy theories are a perfect storm. No-one likes referees in the first place and they’ve always been little short of punching bags who act as human shields for players and managers who fall short of expectation. On top of this, the theories–for example, that Jarred Gillett, who was running the VAR at Bournemouth, is a Liverpool fan and arranged the Saliba sending off to ensure that he was suspended for this week’s Arsenal vs Liverpool Premier League match – simply are going to appeal to a very specific cross-section of people, all the more so when individuals within the club itself are lending credence to them. 

Where this sort of conspiring goes next is just about anybody’s guess. How long will it be before a referee is assaulted? When does it go too far? If the long-term goal of those who are so incandescent at every refereeing decision given against their team that they can’t even focus their eyes properly is to increase the preponderance of VAR, then perhaps that’s the ultimate endpoint; a game refereed entirely using microchips and algorithms, with no room allowable for interpretation. 

If that sounds extreme, it should probably be remembered that we are essentially dealing with people who believe that it’s impossible for human beings to be unbiased. It feels as though the full automation of refereeing might be the only way to come anywhere close to quieting this growing din, and even then it’s not difficult to imagine similar complaints being levelled at those who wrote the algorithm. 

VAR was introduced in order to try and do something about this growing belief that football was too important to get refereeing decisions wrong, but it never seemed to be considered that there are many who don’t care about right or wrong, only that they win. There’s no point in arguing with them. They’ve reached their conclusion and will retro-fit anything to fit that. And in the meantime, all the rest of us can do is wonder where this all ends up, and what might shake us out of this insanity. 

(Cover image from IMAGO)

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