A growing profession

Numerous La Liga refs are now younger than many of the players

Rob Palmer. ESPN Commentator

Friday, 29 November 2024, 16:25

You know you’re getting old when the referees are getting younger.

The image of the whistle-blower, in my youth, was a slightly pot-bellied, sad-looking chap in an ill-fitting, all-black strip.

These days, they’re as fit as the footballers and look as though they’ve spent half of the day in the gym and the rest of it in a Turkish barber’s chair.

It isn’t my imagination; they are getting younger. A career in officiating football matches can become a very lucrative choice. The one thing I’ve noticed when researching referees for match commentaries is their age and general demeanour. Many La Liga refs are now younger than many of the players. the new breed is making it to the top of the profession in Spain around the age of 30. These guys are driven - quite literally, chauffeur-driven to and from games.

The most startling thing I discovered was the salary.

It has been reported that Spanish refs can earn an average of €250,000 per year - you also get to travel. If you make it to the Champions League, there’s all-expense paid trips all around Europe and a tasty fee of €7k per game.

It’s a growing profession. At every match, you have a ref, two assistants and a fourth official, backed up by a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) and Assistant VAR. So that’s six assigned to every game.

The career doesn’t end with the last whistle either. Retired refs can become VARs, assessors, TV pundits, Gladiators refs, newspaper columnists; I even met two ex-refs in a TV quiz show studio last week.

The Spanish refs are paid twice as much as their Premier League equivalents, yet they rate the Brits as the best. When you hear someone say “he refereed the game like an Englishman”, it’s apparently a compliment.

It’s a growing profession and science. La Liga, UEFA and FIFA utilise the “Semi-Automated Offside System”. Spain hasn’t embraced goal-line technology yet - this was highlighted when Barcelona claimed they were denied a goal in last season’s Clásico.

The Premier League should have introduced the offside-system a couple of months ago, but are delaying the rollout as they’re not entirely happy. A glitch was discovered when Robert Lewandoski was judged to be offside when scoring against Real Sociedad this month. Further examination revealed the machine had picked up the big toe of the wrong player’s boot - they say you can’t argue with technology, how wrong they were!

It’s an age-old argument that ex-footballers would make good refs. That’s rubbish - most of them don’t know the’”Laws of the Game” and call them rules.

I admired the system used in the US where players had to undergo a refs course to be allowed a licence to play in youth leagues. They were encouraged to officiate games of younger players and would be paid decent pocket money for doing so.

We now know that you can progress from pocket-money on a playing field to €250,000 on one of the finest fields in the world and make back-page and front-page news.

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