In February 2007, an eleven-year-old girl named Asmahan Mansour was about to go onto the pitch during a tournament in Quebec, Canada, when the male referee working the game told her she couldn’t play. The problem was her attire, specifically something that he claimed might endanger her and other players: her head scarf. Mansour lived in Ottawa and had long played there while wearing the head scarf, or hijab. No referee had identified this as a problem before. But the Quebecois referee clearly had a different opinion.1
In justifying the decision, he invoked the Laws of the Game, the official rules governing soccer around the world. There are a total of seventeen laws, starting with the field of play and its markings and dimensions, and ending with the corner kick. Each of the laws, however, includes many different parts—the current document totals 210 pages. It is the job of the referee to apply and enforce all these laws during the course of a soccer match, a task that requires a lot of interpretation on the referee’s part. This is true of officiating in all sports, of course, yet the referee in soccer carries an extreme level of responsibility. Except in cases where a new technology called the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system is being used, soccer referees generally don’t have access to video replay, and so they have to make decisions entirely based on what they see in the moment. The referee on the field works with assistant referees, usually three of them, and can consult with them on decisions. Two of these assistants run up and down the sidelines of the pitch during the game and are especially crucial in determining whether a play is offside. The referees can consult together on decisions, but the expectation is that they will do so quickly in order to avoid interrupting the flow of the game.
The Laws of the Game offer guidelines, but they require interpretation. There are considerable gray areas surrounding what is considered a foul and how it should be punished. Because of the low-scoring nature of the game, referee’s judgments frequently have a dramatic, even decisive, effect on the outcome. It is strikingly easy to think of games in which an error by a referee—for instance, a penalty kick given when it shouldn’t have been, or not given when it should have been—has been the difference between a team’s winning and losing. As a result, the calls made by referees are constantly contested by players on the pitch and managers on the sidelines. Calls are dissected and critiqued by commentators and fans. Some are remembered ruefully for years, even decades. To be a referee is to carry the burden of knowing that any of the many decisions made in the course of a match may end in controversy.
Still, the Quebecois referee likely could not have predicted the eventual consequences of his determination that Mansour’s hijab was a violation of law number four. This rule states: “A player must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewelry). All items of jewelry are potentially dangerous. The term ‘dangerous’ can sometimes be ambiguous and controversial, therefore in order to be uniform and consistent, any kind of jewelry has to be forbidden.” Just as the rule’s wording foreshadowed, what began as a judgment call by a referee in a girls’ tournament in Quebec became a major controversy in international soccer. The referee’s verdict ultimately involved FIFA in a contentious and long-lasting debate about Islam, gender, and sports.
The referee’s decision was controversial from the moment it was made. The tournament involved three hundred girls’ teams from throughout Canada, including four from Ottawa. When Mansour’s coach walked over to the bench and told her that the referee had decided she had to either take off her hijab or stay on the sidelines, her teammates were outraged. In what one report on the incident called a “swift show of solidarity,” they declared that if she couldn’t play, none of them would. The three other teams from Ottawa joined in the strike. Several dozen young girls had immediately taken a stand in support of Mansour. She initially felt guilty, expressing regret that the incident meant her team didn’t get to play in the tournament. Ultimately, however, she spoke out against the referee’s decision. “I think it’s pathetic, really,” she noted in one interview, because the head scarf was “tucked in my shirt.” It was difficult to imagine a scenario in which this would lead to her getting strangled. As she put it in another interview, she just wanted “to play soccer.”2
What had motivated the referee to make the decision? In Quebec at the time, as in France, there were ongoing debates surrounding the question of whether women should be allowed to wear head scarves or burkas (which cover the entire face and body) in public settings. These debates may have influenced the referee who, as newspapers reported, was also Muslim. Politicians were quickly drawn into the debate over the referee’s decision. One, Jean Charest, rapidly weighed in to support the ban on Mansour playing in a hijab. Charest was then criticized by other politicians who defended Mansour’s right to play wearing a head scarf. Mansour quickly became well known in Canada, her story covered in the nation’s major newspapers. One Ottawa man criticized Mansour and told her she should “rise above petty things like wearing a hijab” and just get on with sport, but other readers came to her defense.
As the referee’s decision quickly became a lightning rod for a broader debate in Quebec and beyond about the hijab, a widening web of soccer officials found themselves having to weigh in. A few weeks later, the matter was brought before the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the FIFA-affiliated board that issues the official rules of soccer, so its members could provide guidance to referees on whether a hijab constituted a danger to players.
IFAB was originally formed in the 1880s in order to facilitate international matches between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. At the time, there were still some differences between the rules of the game issued by the football federations of these countries. The federations decided to create the board in 1886, each country appointing one of its four members, to create a consistent set of rules that would govern international games. In 1904, when FIFA was formed to coordinate international soccer competitions, that organization accepted the authority of IFAB to continue to determine the Laws of the Game. In 1913, FIFA gained a foothold on the board, taking two new seats alongside the four occupied by the UK federations. These four federations, however, remained aloof from FIFA and didn’t participate in the first World Cups in the 1930s. In 1947, however, they joined FIFA, on the condition that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England could compete individually in international tournaments. They also kept their four seats on IFAB. Finally, in 1958, FIFA gained an additional two seats on the board, now made up of eight members. This configuration remains in place to this day. While the FIFA seats rotate among different member nations, the United Kingdom’s four countries each have permanent seats on the board. Because changes to the Laws of the Game require six of IFAB’s eight members to vote in favor, the UK federations remain the dominant force on IFAB. This is one reason why soccer, among global sports, has one of the most conservative approaches toward changing the rules.3
The formal link between IFAB and FIFA has been key to the latter organization’s global dominance over the sport. When national soccer federations wanted to join FIFA in order to participate in international competitions, the organization demanded that they adhere to the rules as set by IFAB. This has also given FIFA power over the training and selection of referees for international competitions. FIFA’s self-appointed power as the guardian of the rules, and therefore, in a sense, the game, is the basis for its extraordinary reach and prominence today. During the 1970s, FIFA evolved from a small, Geneva-based, European-dominated organization whose main point of existing was to organize the men’s World Cup and other tournaments into something much larger and more powerful.
The mastermind of this transformation was João Havelange, who was president of the organization from 1974 to 1998. The first non-European head of FIFA, Havelange presided over a vast expansion of FIFA’s range. Part of his strategy was cultivating links with the large bloc of new members from recently independent African nations. For these countries, joining FIFA was about as important as joining the United Nations as a way of demonstrating their existence on the world stage. Havelange won his election to the FIFA presidency in part by getting the African nations to vote for him, and in return promised that his organization would provide support for the development of local federations and their infrastructure. The African bloc demonstrated its power in the 1980s by successfully getting apartheid South Africa kicked out of FIFA unless it agreed to send racially integrated teams to the men’s World Cup. FIFA had at once become truly international and, in a new sense, truly political.4
During the same decades, FIFA got access to huge new streams of money by charging more and more for television rights to competitions. This change in FIFA was part of a global change in sports culture, one in which teams gained a major new source of revenue in the form of broadcasting rights. The increasing privatization of television stations in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s substantially increased the profits to be gained from selling these rights. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi managed to bring together the power of TV, football, and politics in a way that transformed his country’s institutions and culture. He used his ownership of one of his country’s most successful soccer teams, Milan, as well as the country’s largest media company, to launch a political career. The name of his political party, Forza Italia, evoked a familiar chant sung by fans of the Italian national soccer team. In some ways, FIFA has done the same on a global scale, becoming the odd Frankenstein’s monster of an institution that it is today. It is partly an international organization, with more members than the UN, as its spokesmen often proudly state, thanks to the membership of places like Palestine, New Caledonia, and Wales. It is also a corporation, governing large amounts of cash. And, beyond that, it has become a kind of supranational authority, one with the power to actually push around national governments, and indeed force them to concede forms of legal and geographical sovereignty in return for the right to host a World Cup.
Given FIFA’s reach and power, and the intense controversies surrounding the wearing of the hijab in different societies throughout the world, it was inevitable that Mansour’s case would take on a political dimension. The implications went far beyond a simple question about whether someone can play in a hijab. And yet, in its first consideration of the question, IFAB seemed startlingly ill-equipped to address the problem in an articulate way. In March 2007, after what was described in the press as a “heated” discussion, a representative of IFAB emerged to declare vaguely, “If you play football there’s a set of laws and rules, and law four outlines the basic equipment. It is absolutely right to be sensitive to people’s thoughts and philosophies, but equally there has to be a set of laws that are adhered to.” When pressed to explain what the board had actually decided about whether a player can wear a hijab, the representative had no clear answer. The board had decided not to decide. Referees were left with the burden of determining, on a case-by-case basis, whether the hijab was to be considered “dangerous.” The officials, a reporter noted sardonically, “made clear they were not going to change the existing rules—or explain them.”5
There was something about this moment that crystallized the daunting role the soccer referee takes on. IFAB makes the rules, but these rules only take on meaning through the decisions made, again and again, by referees on the pitch. Training to become a referee is intense, particularly for those who aspire to work in high-level professional matches or international tournaments. It is extremely difficult work. Referees are asked to be mind readers, philosophers, judges, expert negotiators. And counselors, telling people to calm down. And humorists, using a joke here and there to lighten the mood. As if that isn’t enough, they also have to be prepared to be scapegoats, on the receiving end of virulent verbal and sometimes physical abuse by players and fans.
What would the game be without the referee? If you are an optimistic anarchist, you might argue it would be better, that the players would somehow work things out, as indeed they do every day in pickup games throughout the world. If you are more pessimistic about human nature, though, you might easily conclude that it would simply be a melee. The fact is that the referee may actually be the most essential person on the field during any soccer match. If the game is to have rules, someone has to enforce them. In fact, in any given game, many calls by the referees are relatively straightforward, though that doesn’t usually keep players from protesting them. By making these calls decisively, referees enable the game to flow. Without the hundreds of quick decisions they make during any match, the whole exercise would be a farce, one in which everything is up for grabs. Referees represent the idea of soccer as a structure, and of the pitch as a place with defined processes and limits. Without the referees, there could be no game.
What makes soccer fascinating to watch, after all, is that the players have to find a way to move the ball around the pitch without violating the many rules that limit what they can do. Players have to be endlessly creative precisely because of the constraints placed on them by the referee. The referees have to constantly police the boundaries of not only what is acceptable, but also what is possible. In doing so, they make the game the unpredictable drama that it is.
Referees do many basic but fundamental things during the course of a game. They blow the whistle to start and end the game. They oversee the substitution of players from the bench, deciding when to stop play to do so. In most games, a referee holds up a small panel showing the number of the player who is coming off and the one who is entering the pitch. Even such seemingly simple decisions can have important consequences. Given the relatively constant flow of the game, a team can gain an advantage if play is stopped to make a substitution. If a team is winning late in a game, they’ll often make a substitution just to gobble up a little time, with a player sauntering slowly to the sideline, and the referee having to urge her along. These moments are just one of many where the referee has to balance carrying out his duties with the need to ensure the flow of the game is not interrupted.
Referees are given a near-absolute power to punish players for their infractions on the pitch. They do so in various ways. If a foul is committed by one player against another, the referee can stop the game and give the team that was unfairly treated a free kick. If a foul is particularly egregious, because it has placed another player in serious physical danger or has had a dramatic impact on the course of the game, it can be additionally sanctioned with a card. There are two kinds of cards: A yellow card is a warning of sorts, and the player is allowed to keep playing. A red card means that the player has to leave the game, and her team has to play the remainder with one fewer player. If a player gets a second yellow card during a game, that is the equivalent of a red card, and she also has to leave the game. Though the rules about this vary depending on the international competition or league, these sanctions usually disqualify the player from a certain number of subsequent games as well. These aspects of the punishment can sometimes be appealed and altered. During the game, however, the referee’s decisions are absolute and cannot be appealed or changed once they have been made. Their impact on the game is also absolute. That is why Eduardo Galeano goes so far as to call the referee “an abominable tyrant who runs his dictatorship without opposition” and a “pompous executioner” who “raises the color of doom” with a card: “yellow to punish the sinner and oblige him to repent, and red to force him into exile.” The referee can even disqualify a goal, even after a crowd has erupted in exuberant celebration, by calling it offside or noting some other infraction that happened before it was made.6
While the referee is powerful, his subjectivity, and fallibility, is on constant display. There is only one referee on the pitch, patrolling a vast space. He has much more terrain to cover than officials in other sports. In basketball, three officials observe a space the size of the penalty box in soccer. In American football, there are seven or eight officials, with a careful division of labor between them. In soccer, while the assistant referees can help from the sidelines, they are often far away from where a foul has taken place. So a referee is in constant motion, trying to be as aware as possible of what is happening in different areas of the pitch. While the action might be focused around the ball, plenty of fouls can happen when the ball is far away.
Referees, furthermore, have to constantly make decisions based on unknowable things. In soccer, many actions that harm another player are only considered a foul if intentional. That means that referees are tasked with trying to determine what was going on in a player’s head when, for instance, he stuck his foot out in front of another player. Was he just trying to reach the ball, or did he know he couldn’t reach it, and stuck out his leg just so an opposing player would trip over it and fall? If the ball hits a player’s hand, the referee has to decide whether this was intentional—whether the player moved his hand in order to touch the ball—or simply an accident in which the player could not avoid having the ball hit his hand. These decisions are particularly high stakes when they happen in the penalty box, in front of the goal, because if a referee determines a player intentionally hit the ball with his hand there, the referee has to give the other team a penalty kick.
Because referees are attempting to read intentions, of course, players work hard to hide their motives. This can create an infinite regression of interpretation and counterinterpretation. A player brutally kicks another player on purpose—but tries to do so in a way that looks completely accidental—and then jumps up in shocked surprise that anyone suspects he would ever intentionally have done something so terrible. Because it is key to draw a referee’s eye, dramatically falling, flailing, or rolling about when fouled can be a useful tactic, notably because it can make a foul seem worse than it was, or even make it seem like something happened when it didn’t. The Laws of the Game now include rules against “simulation,” so in addition to punishing players who foul, a referee can punish a player for acting like he was fouled when he wasn’t. In particularly egregious cases, a player can even receive a yellow or red card for this infraction.
Soccer becomes infinitely more fascinating once you accept and appreciate this theatrical dimension to the game. Among the many games being played on the pitch is a psychological one between players and referee. The players are always pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. This is not just about the individual performances by players feigning hurt or innocence, though they can be thoroughly entertaining. It is also about the absorbing form of psychic warfare that develops between the players and referee over the course of a match, and sometimes over many games, in cases where players and referees come to know each other. “Influencing the referee is a vital aspect of the game,” writes Ruud Gullit, a Dutch player who was also a manager for Chelsea. Referees, he adds, “try to be objective robots, but of course they are only human.” Many fans appreciate it when the players on their team successfully trick the referee. Nick Hornby recalls one player on the Cambridge team he supported during his college years, Tommy Finney, “whose dives and fouls were often followed by outrageous winks to the crowd.” Such complicity between fans and players is not unusual. You hate it when the other team dives and gets a foul, or fouls and doesn’t get a call, but you love it when your team does. In fact, you expect tricking the referee to be part of players’ skill sets.7
Players try to influence the referees in countless ways. There are games where players argue constantly with the referee, about every decision, even if it is blatantly clear they did something wrong. When the ball goes out of bounds, both teams immediately, almost systematically, put their hands in the air to claim that it should be theirs. Such tactics only rarely impact the decisions of the referees in the moment. Yet the complaining is part of a game of attrition, aimed at sowing doubt in the referee’s mind in the hopes that this will influence subsequent calls. If they believe they have made errors early in a game, referees might try to make things right later on, reestablishing balance and justice. The stakes for players are high in soccer, because if they can somehow pressure the referee into making a decision in their favor around a penalty kick or a red card given to an opposing team, that can often determine the outcome of the game. The persistent ambiguity surrounding many calls combined with the potentially dramatic consequences of one decision creates an incentive for players to constantly be working the referee.
In the midst of all this, the referee must somehow focus on getting calls right, without being influenced by the chattering or gesturing of players, in order to create a sense of justice about the game. Ideally, the referee wants to remain relatively unobtrusive, so that the game can unfold without too much intervention on her part. For this reason, many referees begin a game with a relatively open mind, allowing certain fouls to go unpunished at first so as not to stop the game too frequently. They don’t want to overplay their hand, giving players yellow or red cards too early. Though there is no formal limit to how many cards can be given in a game, it is generally understood that they need to be used sparingly, in part because they can lead to the expulsion of players, which is understood as an extreme measure that shouldn’t happen too often. Players know this and try to get away with early fouls. Gullit describes the “greatest first tackle of a game, ever” as being one committed by the Irish player Roy Keane during a men’s World Cup qualifier against the Netherlands in 2001. In the first minute of the game, Gullit recalls, Keane sent a Dutch player “flying with a merciless tackle into his ankles from the back.” The German referee blew the whistle, but with the game just beginning, he kept his cards in his pocket. For the Irish team, it was a victory. “The tone was set; the first blow struck,” writes Gullit. “The intention was clear; the Irish had declared: you’re getting nothing here today!”8
And yet the referee is also keeping score, and after a time, will often warn players that they have gotten away with something once or twice, but will not get away with more. Referees sometimes call fouls because of an accumulation of actions rather than just one incident. Watching a game, you can often see referees warning players about this, and players holding up a finger or two, arguing that they’ve only fouled a few times and should be given a break. The trick for players is to see precisely how much they can do without getting punished—to foul in a way that takes a toll on the opposing team while falling just short of a card from the referee. Gullit celebrates certain players, notably the Spanish star Xabi Alonso, because he “almost always gets away with fouls” in a way that crucially helps his teams.9
Referees also have to act as prophets or oracles at times, attempting to anticipate what might happen if they don’t stop the game. When a player on an attacking team is fouled, for instance, the referee can decide not to stop play by calling the foul, in order to give an advantage to the attacking side. In such cases, the referee determines that the team has a better chance of scoring a goal if they continue to play than if the game is stopped and they are given a free kick. Once play has stopped naturally—after the ball goes out of bounds, for instance, or is caught by the goalie—the referee can still sanction the foul that was committed, if it is serious enough, by giving out a yellow or red card. Deciding when to give the advantage requires something of the uncanny: How, after all, can the referee predict the future? Generally, however, fans appreciate it when the referee allows play to continue in this way, because it fits the broader ethos that soccer should be flowing rather than stopping and starting.
In many respects, the best referees can hope for is relative invisibility, to be forgotten once a game is over. As for glory or praise, they can pretty much give up on that. Yet, while many fans content themselves with yelling at the referee, there can be a real pleasure in watching referees at work. They know and love the sport, and they have to be in extremely good shape, for they often run greater distances than many players. The vast majority of them are either volunteers or referee as a second career. When anthropologist Christian Bromberger interviewed French referees working in the first-division professional league in the 1980s, he found that they exuded satisfaction and commitment. They had worked hard to get to that level of refereeing, which required at least ten years of experience and a “multitude” of tests, both written and oral, on the rules of the game, along with extensive medical examinations. Though the referees were paid very little and had to deal with constant mistreatment and criticism from players who were paid vastly more, not to mention abuse by fans, they were driven by a mission to make sure rules were followed and order was maintained. Out of twenty-two referees who had been selected to referee French first-division matches, Bromberger found that seven were educators, and others were managers, policemen, or in the military. One of them explained he was inspired by his “conviction that, in life, the rules must be respected.”10
It is fascinating and instructive to watch the different ways referees choose to approach a game. Sometimes referees seem intent on exerting their authority inflexibly, by making too many calls and handing out cards early in a match. This can sometimes work to control players, but in other cases it leads to a choppy, frustrating game. The best referees understand that the cards are really only a last resort, and that there are many other ways of exerting power. One of the things I like to watch for—in part because it allows my imagination to run free—is the conversations referees have with players. My favorite kind of referee is one that exudes a certain calm, perhaps a slight distance from (or perhaps disdain for) the shenanigans happening all around. With a little raised eyebrow, a tilt of the head, a smile and a pat—sometimes a bit patronizing—the referee says to players, “I see you. I know you.” The wise referee, in the center of the chaos, knows that the players are aptly named: they are actors in a drama, performing to gain an advantage. The referee’s goal is to understand the psychology of players, sympathizing with them and knowing them, but also reminding them that, though there are many gray areas, in the end there are lines not to be crossed and rules that must be followed. At their best, referees issue these reminders through words and gestures, rather than yellow and red cards. Otherwise, the referee becomes the focus of the game, and the punishments doled out to players end up shaping the outcome. When a referee has to make too many calls and gives out too many cards, there is a sense that she did not exert sufficient moral control by chiding and talking to players or through other small gestures of enforcement. To referee well, then, requires tremendous skills not only of observation but of persuasion.
The complexities of her role make the referee a central player in the game’s symbolic and narrative dimensions. The referee, in fact, is a big part of what makes soccer such a rich source of emotion, debate, and conversation. Bromberger argues that every game of soccer can be seen as a “drama of fortune in this world.” Soccer feels a lot like life, he suggests, not just because it is unpredictable, but also because it is so often unfair. In soccer, as well as in life, “success depends on a mixture of merit and luck.” Being good isn’t enough, because the system isn’t set up simply to reward talent and virtue. More than other sports, he argues, soccer rewards “patience and deception” in dealing with the “devastatingly powerful referee.” The only way for players to navigate what everyone can see is a “flawed system of justice,” one in which decisions are inconsistent and sometimes arbitrary, is to “help yourself along with a little cheating.” Throughout the game, the referee “counteracts the many forms of trickery with the strictures of the law.” The process, however, is necessarily imperfect, and so inevitably “a match opens itself up to a debate of theatrical proportions.” Those debates are precisely what constitute much of the activity of being a soccer fan. Talking about referees’ decisions, often with great rage and passion, is an essential part of the bonding that creates community around the game. As we talk about and interpret the validity of the decisions made by referees, and the choices made by players, we are also sharing our broader visions of justice, virtue, and fate with one another. Soccer, Bromberger writes evocatively, “illustrates, in a relentless way, week after week, the uncertainty, fluctuation, and possible reversals offered by the present.” The games keep coming, one after another, and in each of them destiny can be rewritten, again and again.11
That may be the secret to understanding why we put up with a game that is so often unfair, arbitrary, and cruel. During tournaments like the World Cup, the fates of national teams are frequently determined by controversial and ambiguous decisions made by referees. Millions and millions of fans watch this happen to their teams, powerless to do anything about it. At those moments, it becomes clear that soccer is one of the most effective tools for mass human torture ever devised.
In truth, however, we love the feeling of being wronged by the referee. It is one of the most powerful and cherished emotions a soccer fan can have. The rage that is directed at the referee is really just a condensed version of the rage that fans direct at the game. To truly love soccer, one probably has to love its fundamental perversity, the fact that theater and trickery—as much as people rail against them—are at the very heart of the spectacle. We tell ourselves that there is fairness in soccer, that on the whole the best teams win, that talent and virtue and hard work lead players and teams to victory. But our experiences of the sport constantly undermine that. One of the uncomfortable but fundamental truths about soccer is this: the fact that it is often so unfair is one of the reasons it is so endlessly absorbing. Without the all-powerful and endlessly fallible referee, we would have so much less to watch and to talk about.
Some refereeing decisions are as famous, or as infamous, as some of soccer’s greatest goals. Fans of the French national team remember well a 1982 men’s World Cup semifinal against Germany, during which the German goalie Harald Schumacher committed a brutal foul against French striker Patrick Battiston. Running out from his goal to challenge Battiston, Schumacher leaped up and struck him in the head with his elbow and knee. The French player fell to the ground, unconscious, twitching. The ball had passed Schumacher by the time the collision happened, so the tackle seemed particularly gratuitous. Standing over the prone Battiston, Schumacher—clearly knowing he had committed a foul—nervously handled the ball. But Dutch referee Charles Corver had not seen the incident and therefore made no call. After Battiston was carried off on a stretcher, the referee whistled for the game to continue. Because the red card Schumacher deserved would have left Germany down to ten players and without their first-choice goalie, the call was likely decisive in a match that ended in German victory. Schumacher was long vilified for the incident: calling someone a “Schumacher” became a nasty insult in France. As the referee who had failed to punish Schumacher, Corver was also long criticized. In 2016, decades later and long after his retirement, Corver was still being asked about this incident that in many ways defined his career.
Corver’s memory of the episode speaks volumes about the curious perspective and position of the referee. “I never saw the incident,” he recalls, because he was watching the ball, which he thought was about to go into the goal. (It went just wide of the goal post.) When Corver subsequently saw Battiston on the ground, he went and talked to his assistant, Scottish referee Bob Valentine, who told him “it was not intentional.” The main camera filming the game also did not capture the incident, so those watching on television, including the Dutch match commentator, didn’t see what had happened to leave Battiston unconscious on the ground. The game went on. While French fans and commentators were outraged about the decision, Dutch newspapers celebrated Corver’s refereeing of the match, with one calling him “sublime.” And FIFA’s assessment of that year’s World Cup referees gave Corver the highest mark among them all. Then, Dutch networks aired video footage that had been taken from behind the goal, clearly showing Schumacher striking Battiston twice in the head. Now, Corver was attacked for his mistake. Once he saw the footage, Corver recalls, he had to admit he had made the wrong call. But he hadn’t seen it on the field—and he only has the one set of eyes. Among the characteristics Corver notes as being critical to being a referee is the good “fortune to see those things that matter.” In this case, he wasn’t so lucky. Though he had a long and successful career as a referee, he is most remembered for this one mistake.12
In 2009, another referee missed a call in another critical game involving France. Martin Hansson, from Sweden, was refereeing a decisive men’s World Cup qualifying match between France and Ireland. The game was tied and went into overtime. In the 103rd minute, French forward Thierry Henry ran forward on the left wing and collected a pass in a way that was a blatant foul. He put his arm out so that the ball would hit and land just in front of his feet. Henry then passed the ball to his teammate, William Gallas, who scored a goal. Hansson allowed the goal to stand, as neither he nor the other referees had seen what became known, sardonically, as the “Hand of Henry,” a reference to Maradona’s famous Hand of God. For Irish fans, the stakes could not have been higher. They were kept out of the World Cup as the result of a clear foul. Henry afterward admitted what he had done and was criticized for not having confessed to the referee at the time that he had committed a foul. The idea that any player would admit guilt at such a moment, of course, is attractive but also naive. If he had done so, Henry could well have forfeited his team’s qualification to the men’s World Cup. As the referee who had failed to make the call, however, Hansson was also vilified. The Irish and international press heaped criticism on him. His promising career as a referee was, at least for a time, derailed. And though he lives in an isolated part of Sweden, some angry Irish fans went so far as to make the trek to harass him at his home.13
Cases like those of Corver and Hansson are outliers. Yet the fear of making this kind of error, one that will never be forgotten and will turn an entire nation against them, must weigh on many referees. That makes it all the more remarkable to see a referee at work calmly and decisively making one call after another, knowing that a single decision can lead to furious controversy, and even reshape a career.
International tournaments can be particularly complex to referee, not only because of the intense, global scrutiny that accompanies them, but also because they bring together players with different expectations and habits. Refereeing in England is not the same as refereeing in Brazil or the United States. There are varying national cultures of fouling, and of arguing. Some referees strictly censure dissent on the part of players. The eighty-year-old Corver, for instance, looks back fondly on the first time he refereed a match with Johan Cruyff. When Corver awarded a penalty against Ajax, Cruyff “waved his hand in a gesture of disapproval.” As the team’s reigning star, Cruyff had gotten into the “habit of doing that, and most of my colleagues tolerated it,” Corver recalls. “Not me.” Corver instead immediately pulled out a yellow card and this earned him Cruyff’s respect. Later in his career, Cruyff twice came to see Corver after matches and gave him his match jerseys. “My son is still proud to own those,” Corver said. For him, the key to refereeing is to communicate authority. “As a referee, you have to have the power to project a certain image and build a reputation for yourself.” Players come to know referees within a league, and so it helps when they have built a reputation for fairness and strictness. This can also happen on the international stage, because referees who gain a good reputation in international competition will be brought back for subsequent tournaments. Some referees become well known among soccer fans, such as Howard Webb, an English referee who was consistently assigned both to important English Premier League games and international matches, including the hard-fought final of the 2010 men’s World Cup between Spain and Holland.14
Today, Corver’s account of the respect shown to him by Cruyff might seem a little quaint. Many contemporary referees endure an endless barrage of insults and back talk that would be considered insane in any other work setting. Imagine an office where, every time a superior made some decision, her employees crowded around, gesticulating, arguing, looking absolutely flabbergasted, and insulting the superior’s mother. Or a courtroom in which, whenever the judge intervened on some point of procedure, a chorus of profanities echoed around the chamber, shouted by observers, while those on trial released a torrent of insults.
Galeano muses on the contradictory, and slightly tragic, lot of the referee, whose job seems always to be to make themselves hated. In fact, the “only universal sentiment in soccer,” he writes, is that hatred. Yet everyone knows the game depends on the referee. Moreover, the effort a referee puts in on the field is, in a way, the ultimate expression of love for the game. He is “the only one obliged to run the entire game without pause.” From “beginning to end,” he chases around “the white ball that skips along back and forth between the feet of everyone else.” Yet except when he holds it in his hands before the game begins, or sometimes when it stops, the referee isn’t allowed to touch the ball. He is in the middle of everything, but excluded from the game he makes possible. There may, in fact, be no one who cherishes being on the pitch more than the referee: “Just to be there in that sacred green space where the ball floats and glides, he’s willing to suffer insults, catcalls, stones and damnation.”15
I remember well a day when, in East Lansing, Michigan, my club team composed of professors and graduate students from Michigan State University ended up playing against a team of referees. It had been pouring rain, and the scheduled tournament had been called off, but we and the referees hadn’t gotten the message. “Why don’t we play a quick game against each other?” they suggested. It was a terrible mistake. Suddenly they had the ball, and they could play. Given that, even in this kind of club league, referees get their fair share of abuse game in and game out, these referees were seeking a bit of vengeance. We sensed this early on, and made sure to be extremely polite. The team of referees, wearing orange, went around us so fast, inexhaustible, laughing as they scored one goal after another. We managed only one against them, accomplished off a free kick that they graciously allowed us to take. In the end, they scored nine goals and walked away laughing, abuzz, almost relieved. Was this our gift to the referees? For once they could simply play, and score, without having to decide what was right and what was wrong.
In many other sports, technology has been readily incorporated into officiating. Referees can stop the game and watch a video replay before making a decision. Using this kind of technology in soccer has long been resisted by many fans, players, and managers, and by IFAB, with the idea that it would fundamentally alter the form and experience of the sport by introducing too many pauses. The flow so many cherish in soccer would, the argument goes, be interrupted too often. If technology promises more reasoned, scientific decisions, then, it also threatens to destroy the sport. There is something appealing, of course, about the idea that soccer can be made fairer through technology. Yet there is also something curious about this desire to improve the game. After all, soccer has conquered the world just as it is. Does it really need to be improved?
In recent years, however, boosters of technology have made important gains. During the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil, FIFA allowed the use of something called goal-line technology for the first time in the tournament. Goal-line technology uses electronic sensors to determine whether the ball has crossed over the goal line and therefore whether a goal should be counted. Its introduction was a concession to the fact that referees had, with some frequency, made mistakes about this in the past, by giving a goal when the ball hadn’t crossed the line or else claiming the ball hadn’t crossed the line when it did. The latter was famously the case during the 2010 men’s World Cup, when a goal scored by the US against Slovenia, which clearly went over the line, was disallowed by the Malian referee Koman Coulibaly. The decision was a lightning rod; suddenly all kinds of people who never seemed to care much about soccer before were enraged that this referee—who, some noted, didn’t even speak English!—had stolen a goal from United States. As soccer journalist Paul Kennedy wryly puts it: Coulibaly’s mistake had performed a miracle. “He accomplished what no one else could in more than 100 years. He made Americans care passionately about soccer.”16
An even more dramatic change is in the works for the 2018 men’s World Cup in Russia, which will incorporate something called Video Assistant Refereeing. The technology was used on a trial basis during the 2017 Confederations Cup, a tournament pitting the winners of various regional championships against one another in the venue that will host the men’s World Cup the following year. A team of Video Assistant Referees sitting in a room full of television screens can watch replays in order to help the referee on the pitch make a decision. This recourse is not to be used often, or lightly. It is meant only for decisions involving goals, penalty kicks, and red cards.
So it is that soccer’s rules are changing. After much lobbying, FIFA and IFAB also decided that, in the end, a hijab is not dangerous on the pitch. After the 2007 nondecision on the matter, national and local federations and individual referees continued to make their own decisions about whether a player could wear a hijab. Mansour could continue to play in a hijab, as she had long done, in Ottawa and other parts of Canada. In fact, as journalist Rosie DiManno wrote, even as IFAB was deliberating the question in England, Mansour was busy “scoring a couple of hummers in Ottawa” wearing a bright red hijab, color coordinated with “her team’s red uniform.” DiManno argued, “Only the most churlish, or pedantic, would claim that there is anything remotely provocative—or athletically unsafe—about the girl’s head covering.” She had interviewed Mansour and her mother, who was supportive of her daughter’s decision. The girl, it turned out, had a particularly strong relationship to the hijab. “It’s not something I would have chosen for her,” her mother explained; she didn’t herself wear a head scarf. “But she made that decision and I look at it as a blessing. She practices Islam, she prays five times a day. It makes her complete.” In fact, the entire incident had made Mansour even more committed to wearing a hijab. The family was proud of all her teammates who had stood by her, in the process showing others “what it means to be Canadian.” Mansour hoped that the officials wouldn’t take too long to clear the way for her to play everywhere. After all, she planned to try out for the Canadian national soccer team in a few years.17
Mansour couldn’t, however, play in Quebec, where the soccer federation had decided the hijab was “dangerous” and therefore outlawed by law number four. For a while, FIFA supported those who were against the hijab. It expanded on the IFAB decision, declaring that no players could wear a hijab in FIFA-organized games. A player who, like Mansour, wanted to compete internationally could not wear a hijab, even if the country she was playing for allowed it. In April 2010, FIFA banned an Iranian national girls’ team from participating in the new Youth Olympic Games taking place in August of that year. The team’s uniform included a covering of the neck and hair. In explaining their ban, FIFA not only argued that the hijab could pose a danger to players, but also cited another law which outlaws advertising on equipment. “Basic compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statement,” declares this law. In 2007, IFAB had shied away from suggesting that the hijab ban had anything to do with religion. In 2010, however, this was exactly what FIFA was claiming. Although the youth team was eventually allowed to play in an adjusted uniform that included a tight hijab, FIFA was not willing to let the matter drop. In June 2011, the Iranian women’s national team was prevented from playing in an Olympic qualifying match in Jordan. The decision was particularly heartbreaking for the players, because it came down only as they were about to go onto the pitch and effectively ended their hopes of playing in the Olympics. It stirred even more outrage than the previous decisions on the matter.18
These incidents launched a new round of debate about whether women should be allowed to play wearing a hijab. Prince Ali bin-al Hussein of Jordan, president of the Jordan Football Association, became a vice president of FIFA representing Asia in January 2011 and strongly advocated that FIFA formally declare that women could play in hijabs. Prince Ali and others pointed out that there were numerous contradictions in FIFA’s policy. Many players sport religious tattoos, for instance, and make religious gestures before entering the pitch, before a penalty kick, or when celebrating a goal. Though these are not on the players’ uniforms, they represent a kind of religious expression. As the writer Awista Ayub argued, FIFA’s approach gave the impression of singling out Islam, since only the hijab was being banned formally. Indeed, the decision seemed to be “targeting one segment of the population—Muslim women.”19
The lobbying of Prince Ali and others slowly succeeded in reversing the policy. In November 2011, the Asia Football Confederation approved a proposal to end the hijab ban, which Prince Ali was tasked with bringing to the FIFA executive committee. The committee, in turn, approved of the motion, and asked IFAB to reconsider its ruling. Finally, in 2012, IFAB allowed for a two-year trial period, during which an “athletic hijab”—specially designed by sportswear companies to cover the hair with a tight fabric—would be allowed in international competition. “There is no medical literature concerning injuries as the result of a headscarf,” IFAB noted, agreeing that the athletic hijab could not be considered “dangerous.” The decision guaranteed that national teams from Iran, Jordan, and elsewhere with players sporting hijabs would be allowed to play in international matches. The French Football Federation, however, immediately implemented its own national ban against the hijab. In Quebec, too, girls and women wearing hijabs continued to be banned from playing. When a nine-year-old girl named Rayane Benatti went onto the pitch wearing a hijab just after the decision was announced, a referee told her that she had to take it off in order to play “for safety reasons.” She refused, and was sent to the sidelines. “It made me feel very sad,” Benatti later said. “I love soccer.”20
In 2014, seven years after the original incident, FIFA ended the two-year trial period and formally declared that athletic hijabs would be allowed in international play. FIFA had, in the end, taken a stand on a question that has been at the center of political debate in a number of countries, most notably France. Those who lobbied FIFA successfully ultimately understood the powerful symbolism of what happens on the pitch. The presence of women in hijabs in international tournaments makes them visible in a way that, undoubtedly, will continue to stir up discussion and commentary. But, in a small way, the space of the pitch has been transformed, opening up new possibilities. Someday, a player on the Canadian national team may score the winning goal in an international tournament wearing a hijab—as Mansour had dreamed of doing—and in the process, offer a new way for people to envision and think about what it means to be Canadian.
The rules of soccer matter because the game matters so much, to so many. As the most visible embodiment of the Laws of the Game, and therefore of the institutions that govern global football, referees are both vital and vulnerable. They represent the institutions that govern global soccer, but are often left alone to figure out precisely how and when to apply the rules. The game depends on them entirely, for they are the ones who contain and control the action, the ones who shape the game by policing its limits. They are the focus of a level of rage, hatred, and accusation that is sometimes breathtaking to behold. They are attacked when they intervene too much and when they intervene too little. And yet, although it sometimes seems like everyone hates the referee, it also can often seem like everyone, both on and off the pitch, wants to be the referee. All fans think, at one point or another, that they are smarter and more observant than the referee in the game—that they would have seen the foul and made exactly the right call. It is common to see a player who has fallen to the ground holding up his hand as if it has a card in it, waving it about, insisting that the player responsible deserves a red card. The referee has to continually point out that she is the only one with yellow and red cards in her pockets. She alone holds this unique power. Sometimes referees hold up their whistles, a tiny symbol of control, and show them to players as a reminder that they are the only ones with the authority to start and stop the game.
Referees might get greater sympathy and understanding if someone developed a video game called “FIFA Referee,” a companion to the extremely popular FIFA series of video games produced by EA Sports, where people get the thrill of taking to the pitch as virtual versions of their favorite players. These games are advertised as being particularly realistic, with the movements of players on-screen based on careful study of the movements of the players on which they’re based. There is, however, one realm in which these games are deeply unrealistic: the referees always make the right call. Imagine what it would be like to play as the referee in such a game. You would never quite know where to look. Keeping your eye on the ball is critical, because you need to make the right call if someone is fouled as he advances. But focus only there, and players will know you aren’t looking at them when they are away from the ball, which means they might be able to get away with something on the side. The sideline officials may see it—but then again, maybe their eyes are on the ball too. Imagine, too, a crowd of players rushing toward you, berating and insulting you. What do you say? How do you keep your composure? How many points would you get, in this imagined game, simply for not losing your cool under such pressure?
Every once in a while, fans and commentators conclude that the referee basically got it right. What doesn’t happen enough—given that referees are, in a very real sense, the ones who make the game possible—is players or fans saying these simple words: thank you.