During his 13-year Premier League career, Mark Clattenburg was one of English football’s most well-respected referees, officiating some of the biggest fixtures in the game, including the FA Cup final, Champions League final and European Championship final.
But referees have one of the most thankless jobs in football and even officials as accomplished as Clattenburg were not immune to criticism and scrutiny.
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On the latest episode of The Athletic FC Podcast, Ayo Akinwolere and Rory Smith spoke to Clattenburg about the growing blame culture surrounding referees and the role the VAR system has played in fuelling it.
A partial transcript has been edited for clarity and length. The full episode is available on YouTube below or in “The Athletic FC Podcast” feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Rory: There is a tendency among fans, players, managers, and executives not to regard referees as human. This seems stupid and sounds like a massive exaggeration, but we like to ascribe all these motivations to what referees do.
I haven’t got this right every time either but I’ve always made a point in coverage of trying to acknowledge when referees do well in an unspectacular fashion. But also not to buy into this easy out of, ‘the defining thing here was the referee’, because too often it’s easy to look at referees and think they want to be the centre of attention.
Mark: That’s the furthest thing from the truth, really…
Rory: It is, but then at the same time, if someone is standing with a whistle in the middle of 22 people, it’s a bit like, ‘Well, they’re the one who’s got the tool to get attention’. But mostly they are people trying to do their best in an incredibly difficult situation. A situation we are making more difficult by failing to understand that they are doing their best.
It’s been tolerated for so long that the immediate thing everyone comes out with after a game is, ‘Well, the referee did this wrong’. Mark says he went into a club and realised the impact refereeing decisions can have on a club. But on the other side, we as a football culture in general don’t necessarily realise the impact our reactions have on the referees as people and that’s important.
Mark: The problem also is that clubs don’t understand. I’ve always said, for example, that Michael Oliver should go to Newcastle United to train and integrate with them and get a better understanding.
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I remember my issue in 2012 with the Chelsea and Mikel John Obi situation. I remember Bruce Buck (former chairman of Chelsea) coming to St George’s Park because the referees were going to go on strike and everybody was upset because the scrutiny I was put under wasn’t fair. And his comment was, ‘We were duty-bound to report the incident’. You’re duty-bound, of course you are, but you should have done some investigation first because it wasn’t John Obi who heard it, it was Ramires who didn’t speak any English. It’s very clever that a person who can’t speak English can make up something I’ve said in my Geordie accent. But that’s another point and another argument.
But Bruce Buck said, ‘What your problem is’, to us as referees, is that ‘you live in a gated community and you’ve got security guards protecting your house’. That was the first time you realised they don’t know what goes on in the real world.
We’re just referees living a normal life in a normal housing estate and we don’t have the protection like football players have. We’re so far apart. That’s when I understood that football clubs are in this glass house and they don’t realise what is outside. Everybody is duty-bound to protect the image of the game and everybody gets frustrated with referees.
Being inside a club, and Rory hit a really important point, everything that filters down doesn’t just affect the football players. Yes, they have a duty to try to play well. But for the kitchen staff, for example, if you get removed from the Premier League, the financial hit is so much that the kitchen staff know they could be made redundant. The morale and the mood across the whole of the club are always affected by the results.
There’s an excuse culture brought in now where there wasn’t years ago when I first got in the Premier League. There were much less excuses. But it’s growing more and more now. I don’t know if it’s financial or if it’s pressure. Working for a club, I could understand both sides. But ultimately, what’s created a bigger problem is the VAR system.
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Everybody accepted a referee making a wrong decision or analysing the decision from what they saw. But in the end, people accepted that. But what they can’t accept is VARs still not getting decisions right. This is what has created an even worse feeling in football. They think they have a system in place that is foolproof and it’s not. It’s not even technology. I hate when people say it’s technology because it’s not. It’s a human being. Yes, the offside has now changed because it’s more technology-based, but it’s still a human being who has to verify the decision. So it’s a human error.
It’s created a big problem now because when the VAR doesn’t get decisions correct, it creates even bigger frustration.
You can listen to full episodes of The Athletic FC Podcast free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and watch on YouTube.
(Top photo: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
