Respect
Posted on November 9, 2010 8:17 am
It’s probably far from unique but the fact that the United States Soccer Federation is FINING EVERYONE IN SIGHT – including a $5000 hit on management and ownership – on a team from another country nicely underlines two of my favorite themes: the weirdness of teams from other countries playing under the auspices of the USSF and the appalling lack of respect for soccer officials.
The former is apparently unfixable; it’s the kind of thing that we’re going to have unless and until Canada grows up and gets their own country instead of simply being Americas’ hat and I’m not holding my breath.
The second is the biggest problem with the beautiful game, and could be solved tomorrow.
There’s been much discussion about the new rules in the NBA where zillionaire players are now getting ejected for even the mildest dissent; the league decided to get serious about all the whining and fixed the problem with one simple memo.
Want to bitch about a call? Fine, see ya. And thanks for that enormous pile of money.
And while we can all stick our noses in the air and airily harrumph over the mouthbreathing, knuckle-dragging steroid freaks that the NFL calls football players, but the league referees – like game officials in every sport – routinely make game changing mistakes without being surrounded by crowds of insane howler monkeys, screaming and gesticulating and refusing – over and over and over – the officials’ orders to back off.
Is it because HandSpheroid players are more genteel and good natured than soccer players? More respectful of authority in general? Too stupid to understand when they’ve been shafted by a blind imbecile with a whistle? Less “fiery and competitive”?
Or is it because getting all up in an NFL officials’ face will not only find his wallet lighter by an enormous amount but there’s a good chance they’ll be suspended until they’re 40, and if it ever happened again they’d find themselves pushing brooms at a mall someplace.
In short “zero tolerance” doesn’t mean “we’ll be, like, really put out at you”. It means the wrath of Roger Goodell will descend upon your life and everything you do on a field will be put under a microscope from now until the end of time.
(And as a side note: what the hell does “suspending the Impacts’ Technical Director for six games” mean, exactly? That he’s not allowed to go down on the pitch? Wow. Talk about taking a hit.)
Yeah, yeah, don’t give me the “Well, they don’t make much money so a $200 fine or a $500 fine is the same as dinging Dwight Howard fifty million bucks” argument. I don’t buy it.
In the overall scheme of things, $200 is $200. Period.
I firmly believe that if MLS really wants to move up into the panoply of Big Boy Sports leagues the first thing – I mean the very first thing – that has to happen is for the players, at all levels, to learn that they have to say “Yes sir” to the guy with the whistle. Even when he’s wrong.
ESPECIALLY when he’s wrong.
American sports fans just don’t get this Debating Society school of game management. The call is the call. If it stinks, it stinks. The fans can boo as loudly as they want as long as they like. Feel free.
Soccer allows a different culture and it’s where incidents like this come from. Like they say about a problem kid in school: it’s not his fault, he was raised that way.
As for the Impact, this will sound churlish but it has to be said: that club and their fans have a serious thug mentality, for whatever reason – they always have – and MLS ought to stop counting the money for a few minutes and worry about it.
The problem with soccer is that there is no real way to challenge an official’s call or to have it reviewed by other officials sitting in a video booth. Soccer, especially international matches, has by far the worst officiating of any major sport. There’s simply no accountability for the officials. As I understand it, they don’t even have to explain why they called a foul. That leads to a lot of furstration for fans and players. Not that screaming at an official is justified, but I understand where the players are coming from.
Baseball.
As the RailHawks team photographer, I was on the field for the postgame mess. The punishments were more than appropriate. A couple players were lucky not to leave the field and stadium grounds with local cops. One of the Montreal players, and I’m not sure which, actually pushed over one of the officials, which is why I am a little surprised one of the punishments isn’t much, much more severe.
And all of this leaves out Adam Braz nearly starting a brawl on his way off the field in the player tunnel and the altercation between Montreal players and a new Carolina fan group at the Montreal team bus where a couple of Impact players waded into the fans.
It’s probably a good thing that the team was flying on Saputo’s jet and not commercial travel for the ride home.
Screaming at an umpire is pretty rare. You certainly don’t have players whining and moaning after every bad call. Even when an ump blew a call that cost a pitcher a perfect game, you didn’t see him or his teammates freaking out. And pitching a perfect game is a more impressive feat than pretty much anything else in sports.
Tennis.
$200 is chump change.
I don’t. Not really. For the vast majority of calls in all sports leagues there are no review and no explanations. Yet, I don’t see the behavior I routinely see in soccer games any where else.
Not in the NHL, not in the NFL, and not in the NBA. In MLB, you’ll get the occasional coach who’ll go face to face with an umpire, but that usually ends in ejection – you almost never see a player confront an umpire, and you often get quick ejections of players at the plate who make sarcastic remarks over balls and strikes.
There’s really no excuse. The fact that it happens is because it has been allowed to happen. Just like the U17WC in Finland experiment where players touching a dead ball got a mandatory yellow. – It actually worked. After a couple of games, the players adjusted to the new enforcement.
A lot of folks whine about diving and play-acting in the game. I’ve always been much more embarrassed about the complete indiscipline of players with regards to the game’s officials. It is really shocking, coming from the way player/official relations are handled in other sports in the U.S., to adjust to the ludicrous, immature stuff that’s allowed – yes, allowed – to happen in professional soccer.
Depends on how much you make in a year, doesn’t it.
Players should only shut up when all leagues actually take a stand against poor officiating. Until there’s fines and other “real” penalties for officials blowing calls, changing the course of a game/deciding games, let the players hold them accountable.
If you screw up, you get fined, miss out on games (without pay), etc. Just my feelings on the situation.
I stopped watching basketball well over 10 years ago, and a big part of that was because players were slapped with fouls for not being able to dispute a call. No matter what your profession, if you screw up, you need to be called out on it.
What I find most confusing are the punishments: 6 games and $1500 for Technical Director, 4 games and $200 for a player, 3 games and $1500 for another, 6 games and $500 for another.
Can anyone explain the lack of progression? How can someone do something so grievous it nets a 6 game suspension yet only levies a $500 fine while another gets away with half the suspension but triple the hit in the wallet?
If fines were based on player contract income or something then I get it, but taken out of context this makes no sense…
It’s great that in basketball, football and baseball you can eject a player and it doesn’t give the other team a true man advantage for the entire remainder of the game. I’m not in favor of widespread red cards for dissent. But after the fact fines and suspensions….absolutely….do it now. I don’t even think the fines have to be all that excessive, the suspensions themselves will get the point across. Even if the players don’t see it, the coaches darn sure will.
Rugby
;O)
FYI,
Saturday, in a first round FA Cup match, Ebbsfleet United at Wimbledon. Ebbsfleet’s Carew, already carrying a (rather harsh) caution for an earlier foul, appeared to challenge the referee’s decision on his subsequent foul of a Wimbledon player. The ref didn’t hesitate to pull a second yellow, and Carew was sent off for apparent dissent.
Mind you, the referee had sent off Wimbledon’s arguably most dangerous players only about five minutes before, and on a call that in no way appeared to justify a straight red.
These two prior calls by the official should have put Carew on notice that the referee was quick to show a card, and he should have kept his mouth shut. By failing to do so, he gave away a man advantage that Ebbsfleet badly needed against a home side near the top of the next division up. If I were his Daish, his manager, he’d be facing a fine.
The referee made had made unduly harsh calls each way, but it was stupid for Carew to challenge his authority. He was properly booked, and ejected for dissent. There was no more yapping at the referee afterwards, although there was some (respectful, in all appearances) conversation between the Ebbsfleet captain(?) and the officials as the teams left the pitch at half-time.
In my playing, coaching, and refereeing experience, most officials will be willing to explain a call, and to give a respectful ear to any player, if the conversation takes place quietly, and after the heat of the moment. Some officials won’t but they were very much in the minority, and were usually the most inept in any case.
As a player in leagues where the same officials called most of the games, I found that this respectful attitude paid dividends, particularly if you also played a straight-up style. Specifically, you would have great credibility with the officials when you objected to a call, if you had already established your reputation as a clean player that knew and respected the laws, and the officials. It’s only human nature to reciprocate that respect. On one occasion, I was able to convince the referee to rescind the red card he’d issued in the mistaken belief that a player had sworn at him.
At the moment of the call, however, the discussion should be limited to the officials, and (at the official’s discretion, because it is NOT mandatory to do so), with the
captain(s). If you aren’t the team captain and have a beef with the call, take it to your captain, or ask the official to discuss the call during a lull in subsequent play.
If you can’t do better than that in your self-control, then you will, and should, quickly find your name in the book, and have no room to complain. Do it too often and your own captain should be shutting you up, because your ego will hurt the team.
Frankly, I wish that this would happen more often, as it’s one of the many stains on the sport that need to be cleaned up, and it’s one of the easiest to remedy. I’d love nothing more than to see a match where a team that gangs up on the officials immediately loses two-three players from straight reds. Even better if it’s both teams. This crap would stop inside a month.
The whining and pleading by players is incredibly pathetic. Combined with the flopping and faking of injuries, those are big reasons why soccer has had problems breaking into the US market. Seeing some Italian player crying like a little girl after flopping supports a lot of Americans’ attitudes that soccer is kind of a wuss sport.
re: “baseball”
As someone else pointed out, players are ejected all the time in baseball for complaining–non-demonstratively–about balls and strikes. Baseball probably has the least whine-accomodating culture in American sports. You almost never see a player get aggressive with an umpire, and if they do they will always get a lengthy suspension. The manager tirades are stupid, but they always get ejected and often get suspended.
As someone who came to soccer relatively late in life, seeing players touch referees aggressively was very jarring. Besides the stretcher and other flopping acoutrements, the way soccer referees are treated was the biggest turn-off to me.
If people think it’s not a big deal they probably aren’t involved in youth soccer, or they are “involved” to the extent that they bitch about U10 refs from the sideline.
If a ref doesn’t pull a red or yellow card for a mouthy player, but that player gets absolutely shithammered by the league or federation after the fact, I’m fine with it. I wouldn’t even bother with fines. Just start handing out the one-game suspensions, and players will start moderating their behaviors pretty damn quickly. Besides, in a league where you’ve got Old Spice earning what he does and Chris Wondolowski earning what he does, it’s pretty tough to hand out fines that are appropriate to the players’ earnings. But missing a game check? That hits everyone equally hard.
But you know what? If a player is being a jackass to a ref, I’ve got absolutely no problem if that ref decides to pull a card out of his pocket. You don’t want to be booked or sent off and potentially put your team behind the eight ball? Then don’t act like a jackass to a ref.
And the whole “some refs deserve it” bullcrap is the weakest of weak sauce. Maybe some do. But that decision isn’t up to some hotheaded clown in the middle of the game who is incensed that the ref has the temerity to take objection to a tackle that could’ve broken a leg.
My rule was, if you are a captain I will talk calmly with you, everyone else, talk to the captain. I think touching an official should be met with automatic red and a 2 game suspension. If the player says they didn’t mean to touch them, tell them not to get so close.
from the Dad’s perspective, its really hard to explain why they should always be respectful of the ref when their heroes are whining on the field.
Just do it MLS, it worked for basketball. Not a yellow, just mandatory fine and then a suspension. But you should do the automatic yellow for touching a dead ball, that’s just disrespectful.
I think you meant to say, “until the Home Nations no longer hold half the votes on the IFAB.” As long as that is the case, having one country’s teams play in another country’s league is a justifiable practice.
Right. Because whining and moaning after every bad call is the manager’s job.
Not even close. You can watch half a dozen tennis matches without seeing the kind of fit you’ll see numerous times in every soccer match.
Normally, I consider Bill Archer nigh unto a minor deity whose word is law, or at least, a very strong suggestion.
But not today, my friend. Not today.
Explain to me again why we should expect ultra-competitive professionals who are exposed to a ruthless selective process of perform-or-push-off to put up with the appalling incompetence of officials and their blazered masters in the corrupt soccer hierarchy?
the problem is NOT with the players, it is with the officials, who cannot do their ********ing job with even the modicum of competence you would expect from a stoner barista, and the soccer authorities who absolutely refuse to do the two things that will fix the problem: 1) apply the same ruthless pressure to officials to perform that occurs to players and 2) apply the readily available technological tools that will raise performance levels across the board.
Players are not stupid. They know perfectly well that the goal of the soccer powers that be is NOT to have a well-officiated match, it is to achieve other goals ranging from nebulous to nefarious. And they know that their only point of leverage is on the actual official on the field, since one of the few things that can actually force action to be taken against an incompentent with a whistle is to have him completely lose control of the match in a way that embarrasses the soccer authorities. So the players exploit that reluctance to impose match-changing sanctions and turn the game into a farce, and take the opportunity to exert direct psychological pressure. Good for them.
At every level of soccer I have seen, from U-little right on up, the number one factor creating dissatisfaction for all involved is the officials. And they are at the same time the most resistant to all critique or change, they live in their own little world of self-congratulation, just visit their boards.
Repeat after me:
Refs are the problem.
Refs are the problem.
Refs are the problem.
Punishing the VICTIMS of the problem, namely the players, is Orwellian and indeed Kafkaesque
AmericanKaka,
Just curious, how many matches have you refereed or run the lines?
I spend plenty of time around basketball and the courtroom, and while the participants in those places are “ultra-competitive professionals who are exposed to a ruthless selective process ” they don’t freak out at authority like soccer players when it messes up, because they will be punished.
The “victims” of bad officiating and atrocious player behavior are the paying fans, not professional players.
None. So of course, as a ref, you think I don’t have a right to say anything about it.
That insular, kneejerk ref mentality is a huge part of the problem.
If the US justice system, however far from perfect it is, had the error rate of, say, the average MLS ref, there would be a revolution in this country. That’s your freak-out.
Although less so recently, I was a fanatical basketball fan for a long time, and of course, I saw games, sometimes big games, decided by terrible and/or biased officiating… usually in favor of UNC. But the overall sense of injustice was much, much lower because the games were, overall, much, much better officiated in basketball than they are in soccer, and it is harder for even the worst officials to decide the outcome because of the difference in scoring systems.
If I made mistakes in my job at the rate soccer refs make mistakes, and exhibited their overall level of incompetence, I would be fired. So would most people who don’t have government jobs (ie, who also work within a structure of zero performance accountability just like refs).
Even at the youth soccer levels, I have never yet met a ref who was not a pompous ass. Such people gravitate to the job, because it is an easy way to feel a sense of power over others. The most pompous and incompetent rise the highest. Meet Howard Webb.
AmericanKaka,
And, how many matches have you played at a competitive level…I’ll be generous, let’s say U-14 select or beyond?
I’m with you Mr. Archer.
Regardless of how bad a referee’s call might be, a crowd of players whining about it only makes it worse. I really do believe that. The only thing worse than a really bad call is a crowd of players acting as if arguing about it will change it.
Because it’s not the bad call that strips the game of its professionalism, it’s players refusing to treat the game as if it’s a professional enterprise that strips the game of its professionalism. And let’s be honest, we don’t watch professional sports to see something amateurish.
The bottom line: There do need to be ramifications for poor refereeing. But those ramifications cannot come from players. It is not their job to police the referees. We all know that they’re not impartial. It’s the job of the league to police the referees. That has to be emphasized.
Yes, managers haggle umpires in baseball, but that is not a proper analogy. In that case, it’s more a comedic sideshow woven into the very culture of the game than anything else. Everybody watching knows that the umpire is never going to change his call, and we all know that the manager KNOWS that the umpire is never going to change his call. And we all know who’s really in charge in that scenario, too: All the manager has to do is say one wrong thing, or breathe too strongly in the umpire’s general direction, and the umpire can (and often does) order him off the field. And we all know that if ordered off the field, the manager will leave.
The Xenophobic references towards Canada playing in “your” league are a nice touch. Maybe you haven’t noticed but this happens in North American sports… well, actually it happens all over the world now that I think about it. Most of us are used to it by now, too bad you aren’t. Oh well.
I think part of the reason players/coaches/etc get all up in referees’ grills is because they know there is no other way to vent or correct the situation. Bad calls by refs do not get reviewed or punished by the league.
I know I’d be more inclined to control myself if I knew I could have a game changing bad call reviewed by the league who would in turn fine the referee. At the very least, MLS should tie officials’ salaries to the number of good/bad calls they make.
Refs may or may not have serious problems, but 100 years from now, someone may be able to look up the box score from that game and it will say Carolina 2-1 Montreal. The call is the call is the call. Confronting refs like that after a game is something you see frequently in Central and South America. It should never happen there or anywhere. Bad calls happen. But you know what, far more often, good calls happen. I understand the frustration and the competitive fire and all that, but confronting refs like the Impact did is wrong. Way, way wrong.
If it were Toronto, and MLS had done this, that would be the same as other sports. If it were some private group running DII, that would be the same as other sports.
I think your point was that the group running the league has to do this, and for DII this year, that’s USSF. Absolutely right. For better or worse, they’re in charge and they have to handle it. Bill’s point is that it’s ridiculous that a national governing body was forced to run a league, especially one with teams from other countries. But such is the cluster**** of lower-level soccer.
MLS might seem bush-league at times, but when you look at DII and WPS, not to mention all those leagues from the 20′s right up to the NASL, you realize it could be much, much worse.
Why do many here start with the assumptions the 1) the call was incorrect 2) that expressing frustration is somehow justified, and 3) that there’s no oversight or review of referee performance?
You know that every referee is assessed every match in MLS right? Also, I don’t know if this is the case now, but match fees were tied to how the officials were rated the prior year. The highest ranked referees made the most per match and so on… It’s nice to say something like this assuming nothing happens, but you can look at the assignments read quite into how performances are rated.
That’s true. It’s a very, very widely held assumption that there’s no accountability in refereeing, but it’s not a correct assumption.
I think that might be because there’s fairly little transparency in the accountability process. We never learn what grade a ref got. Occasionally, USSF will highlight a missed call in their weekly reviews, but they only do that when they think there’s instructional value in it to other refs, they don’t systematically tell us who did a good job and who didn’t.
We also can’t be sure of what the USSF wants out of its referees, and what guidelines they’re using in their grades. There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple years about alleged instructions not to break up the flow of play (and thus to let the players get away with a little more). But most of it’s rumor stuff, because we don’t see whatever policy memos the Fed puts out.
Presumably because if you thought it was hard for refs to get respect now, imagine a ref who consistently got graded below his peers. He doesn’t have to be bad, just not as good as the others, and his control of the game is gone.
No sport does this, because no sport could hire refs if they did. They’d all quit.
Good point, as I think it’s already a big part of the problem that refs aren’t respected, much like Bill asserted originally.
Is there a way to square that circle? To convince people that there’s accountability in the process without calling out refs individually? Maybe by publishing only aggregated data?
The NFL referees have accountability. No soccer federation in the WORLD is similar in that regard, so apples to oranges comparison.
Also, the NFL learns from it’s mistakes with reffing, and makes adjustments and does what it should to correct calls. They have instant replay, coaches can challenge, etc.
Soccer > NFL, but give the NFL credit – they try to improve the refs and at least have accountability. Soccer can’t hold a candle to that.
Almost all of the training materials and videos are available. The position statements and policy papers are also on the US Soccer website. When I was a referee, you knew if you passed an assessment but never knew the actual score. I also never knew the status or scores of the others in the crew. It’s not meant to be public. The feedback exists to improve performance and to guide assignors and administrators in assigning and upgrading/maintaining a referee’s grade level. It’s not public, but you have an idea how people perform based on the assignments. Look at the MLS assignments, you’ll see cases where referees just disappear. There are also cases where fan and player perception may be poor, but where controversial decisions were actually correct.
What???!!! You mean fans and players are sometimes wrong when they disagree with refs??!! How dare you?>???!!!!!
Seriously — on more than one occasion, I’ve seen a shot that hit the side netting that may have appeared to be a goal from elsewhere in the stadium. So the fans tossed their confetti and cheered. Then when they saw the keeper lined up to take a goal kick, they booed. Bet they felt silly later.
Classic case from D.C. of the TV cameras and ref seeing more than the crowd could: Christian Gomez got a red card in a playoff game. Huge books all over RFK. In the pressbox, we looked up at the replay and saw a big spray of spit from Gomez toward another player — I believe it was C.J. Brown. Unquestionably red. Fans couldn’t have seen it. Ref did.
The dissent shown today is ridiculous and completely unneccessary. That, and laziness
, are the 2 major reasons I’ve never added reffing to my coaching and administering of youth soccer. I would not respond well to some kid running up to me to bitch about a call, especially if I was sure I had it right.
If leagues/federations and refs wanted to get rid of dissent, they could do it in the first few weeks of a season. Announce before the season starts that anytime a player approaches a ref to complain, it’s dissent and a caution. If 7 players approach the ref (aka “a Chelsea”), all 7 get cautions. Anytime a player touches a ref, it’s a send-off. Period. Then do it. When the actions hurt the players and the teams, the players and coaches will make it stop.
Players don’t get to “grade” refs because players aren’t neutral, and a shocking number of them don’t know the rules. Most players’ definition of a bad call is one that goes against their team. My players know the rules, because I make them read the rules, and I ask them questions about the rules. My players also know not to argue with the ref. Ever.
The rule book says a player is shown the yellow card if he commits “dissent by word or action”. It doesn’t say it’s a card if he commits “dissent by word or action, unless the referee screwed up.”
This whole argument about “players should have the right to yell at referees because there’s no other recourse” is a complete crock. Fans bitch all the time that referees don’t have the guts to make tough calls. Well maybe they would if they knew they weren’t going to need police escorts to leave the pitch afterward.
Besides… professional soccer players nowadays bitch ALL THE TIME, even when the calls are blatantly obviously correct. You can’t watch a match anymore without seeing a guy pull an opponent down with two fistfuls of jersey, hear the whistle blow, and then act indignant about the call. At least when managers and players scream at baseball umpires, they think they’re right. And even on the occasions where the players THINK they’re right, they’re not. I can’t tell you how many times I put the flag up on a player who was offside by three steps, only to wind up needing Advil for an earache caused by that same player telling me I didn’t know what I was doing.
Not to mention — soccer has a lot of decisions that are literally SO CLOSE that there is no right call. If we allow players to make a huge scene after every one of those incidents, it’d be chaos all the time. Sometimes it is anyway. If you meandered over to the referee boards during the World Cup, you’d have seen several threads that went on for weeks at a time, because there were calls that were so tight that a bunch of referees who had the benefit of watching tape for a week STILL couldn’t agree.
you know what would shut everyone up real quick? immediate re-starts in every situation except penalties and instances where the fouled player goes down hurt. might cut down on those stupid late clattering challenges that are “meant to send a message” and on the feigning of injury too. wanna argue the call, go right ahead, but the rest of your team is probably more worried about marking up than your sense of injustice.
Sure, say what you want about the game, but where did the “thug attitude” of the fans come from? As far as I know, Montreal has never played columbus so you’re relying on second hand evidence.
In the NHL, only the captain of the team gets to talk to the refs after a whistle. You say anything more than a couple of sentences of dissent to the refs and you get a 10 minute misconduct penalty. Say anything else and you get to hit the showers early and give the NHL several thousand dollars.
Soccer suffers from an extreme case of the, “broken windows” theory. Too much of what is provocative and the cause of the awful behavior from players is due first and foremost to the unwillingness to officiate the game by its laws. In many leagues they have…well, “defined deviancy down” (to stay on a theme) to a point that clear fouls are simply accepted as part of the, “physical nature” of the game. Want to start an interesting blog? Start one called, “Why Isn’t This A Foul?” You’ll have no shortage of footage to link to each each week.
I hate what I see from players; in its way it’s just as ridiculous as watching fighting in the NHL. But considering the way the game is officiated, it’s an expected behavior. Really, the game needs a radical change: video replay, backline officials, and enforcing of the rules strictly and consistently.
Until those changes are made, the players will take what they are given and will act out towards the refs in worse and worse ways. And fans being the partisans that they are will take their cue from the players and have the their feelings validated by that clever invention called instant replay. Here I think Bill has it wrong: it’s not the whining culture of soccer that hurts MLS and makes soccer the odd man out in the US, but the unwillingness of Fifa and the sport at large to change. Fans and media I think can relate to a player’s anger at being wronged-even when they know that the player is behaving like ass. What perplexes Americans is an unwillingness to, “get it right.” And soccer suffers this in spades.
And once the “ooohh, but the refs are deciding the game” nonsense dies down, things would be 100% better.
The U17WC in Finland was a great experiment. Touch a dead ball that doesn’t belong to your team, and you get a yellow card. It worked great. It took about two days into the tournament, and it stopped being an issue. Not only that, it’s main purpose – to speed restarts, was a resounding success.
If a player misses a big match because of cards for dissent, it wasn’t the ref that was “deciding the game”. It was the player who did it.
I’m right with you. on all counts.
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