Please, no. Not Eye of the ****ing Tiger

Game 24, 2020-21

"Nooooooooo!" It's still 40 minutes to kick off, but already I'm in mental agony. My changing room is next door to the away team, and they're playing motivational warm-up music. There seem to be only two criteria for such music - it has to be blasted out at an intrusively loud volume on a below-par sound system, and the choice of song has to be the most unimaginative shite with the perceived widest appeal. In today's case, Eye of the fucking Tiger. They can't hear my cri de coeur, of course, because Eye of the fucking Tiger is way too loud. I can't stress enough how much I hate this song. That dumb, macho opening riff I've heard 25,000 times too often. The whiney vocals. The asinine lyrics. And then everything else about it, which sticks in my poor, suffering head for the entire first half. 

If the International Football Association Board gave me free rein to add just one law to the game, any law, then it would be this: "Teams playing loud pre-match motivational music that annoys the ref will be issued with a collective eleven yellow cards prior to kick-off. No exceptions. Should that pre-match music consist of Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, those cards will be red, the game will be abandoned, and the opposing team awarded a 25-0 win. The ref shall be permitted to access the offending team's changing room with a heavy hammer to attack the source of the music and render it beyond further sonic re-production."

I think that's reasonable. It certainly makes a lot more sense than the comical handball law IFAB's now had to retract and pretty much restore to its original state...

A radical change to the Offside Law for the amateur game

Game 31, 2019-20

For amateur games where there are no neutral and qualified linesmen/assistant referees, I propose that the International Football Association Board (IFAB) add the following clauses to Law 11, Offside:

* Any team that attempts to influence the referee's decision by appealing for offside, either verbally or through gestures such as raising an arm, automatically renders the opposing player in an onside position. In this way, the unsportsmanlike conduct of the defending team directly benefits the attacking team.

* All attempts to influence the referee's decision with regard to offside decisions shall be classified as unsporting conduct, and be punishable with a caution (or a ten-minute time penalty in leagues that operate sin-bins).

* Any protest from an attacking player deemed by the referee to be in an offside position will likewise be punishable with a caution. 

This would be a radical change to the law, but it would make an immense difference to refereeing at the lowest levels of the game, where there is a serious lack of the necessary three match officials for the following two reasons:

What's the point of re-taking an illegal goal kick?

Game 14, 2018-19

There's one football Law that I dislike in particular. A given team is taking a goal kick, and the goalkeeper, say, plays it short to a defender on the edge of the area. There is no attacking player anywhere near the defender - that is, the opposing team are not part of the current craze for pressing, or counter-pressing, or whatever the 1001 Apostles of Klopp are calling it this week. 

The defender receives the ball just inside the penalty area, or on the line of the penalty area. The law says that you have to blow the whistle and make them take it again. The same if it's a free-kick taken from within the penalty area. So you're faced with the following choices:

1. You blow and insist on the re-take. Everyone sighs, some might utter an epithet. Bloody hell, ref, does it matter? Such a trivial stoppage for, really, nothing. The Germans have a great word for it - kleinlich, which covers petty, fussy, pedantic and nit-picking all in one. Sometimes Bundesliga refs will be marked down in kicker magazine for being kleinlich, and to me there's no greater criticism. I think I'd rather be called useless, inept, blind and corrupt.

Why do I referee?

Refereeing at the amateur level is a barely compensated activity that affords us much loud and personal abuse, and often provokes the question among friends, relatives and neutrals: "Why in the name of all that's profane do you spend your weekend doing that?" I have no idea, is my stock response. Joking aside, though, I really have no idea. That is, when I look at it dispassionately sitting safely at my computer terminal. In reality, I'm no closer to giving up than I was the day that I started nine years ago. 

This week I was interviewed on a number of football-related topics by Mike Woitalla of Soccer America, who asked me about the difference between refereeing in Germany and the US, my favourite idea for a change to the Laws of the Game, and why I referee at all.

SOCCER AMERICA: You've been living in Germany now for three years after living 16 years in Washington, D.C. Anything you miss about American soccer -- as a writer, fan, coach, referee or soccer parent?

As a referee and coach, I miss the generally calmer atmosphere of U.S. youth soccer. In Germany, it's always intense, at times intimidating, and occasionally downright violent -- in both youth and adult soccer. I'm trying to inculcate the importance of sporting values to my boys' U-15 team -- getting them to stay calm when fouled, or to shake the ref's hand at the end of the game, for example. It's a more or less permanent struggle. In my first year as a referee here, I almost quit several times. Now I've developed a very thick skin and write a blog to offload and have found that's really helped, but the change was a huge culture shock for me.

SA: If you could change a rule in soccer, what would it be?

Ten-minute time penalties for dissent. At the moment, the rule is a yellow card for "dissent by word or action," but it's only enforced in the most extreme cases. If I cautioned every case of dissent in my German amateur league games the field would be deserted after 30 minutes. I'd love to see referees respected as they are in rugby -- a single word to the ref and you're out to the sin-bin. If rugby players can do it, soccer players can learn it too.

SA: Why did you start refereeing and why do you continue?

For one season, my eldest daughter was on a travel team in the U.S. (she hated it and went back to rec) and they needed parents to train as assistant referees, so I volunteered. I was assigned to a tournament and really enjoyed it, so I straightaway trained to become a center ref too, and quickly realized that after more than 35 years as a player I didn't know half of the Laws of the Game (like most players). Despite the abuse, I'm in my 10th year of refereeing, and I keep doing it because I love being out on the soccer field -- most days, it's where I feel like I belong, where I'm happiest.

Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022. 

Analysing IFAB's June report - the general verdict: Yes!

The report last month by the International Football Association Board on forthcoming trials and discussions with regard to the Laws of the game was met with customary scepticism by an instinctively conservative football press. Change? We can't be doing with that! And yet IFAB has been slated down the years for being exactly that - too stuck in its ways to make anything besides fussy, pernickety adjustments to the Laws that have served to confuse rather than clarify.

Elleray - progressive report (pic: Fifa.com)

All that has changed under the tutelage of former referee David Elleray, who has been prepared to listen and discuss. He sees the need for change, while accepting that this involves a long process of trial and debate. The report contains some excellent suggestions. First, let's take a look at some of the laws that will be tried out in FIFA tournaments and offer simple verdicts - Yes, No or Maybe:

1. Showing the red card (RC) and yellow card (YC) to team officials for irresponsible behaviour.

Verdict: Yes. There is no good reason not to do this. Coaches don't always understand the three-stage system of verbal warnings leading to dismissal. Most have never even heard of it.