I think you make good points, but I don't think it's as inseparable as you make it. If NWSL is the top women's league (arguable), it should have the top referees who are making it to the WWC. To an extent, that's what happened, except we're speculating she may not even get a game. So are we developing the best referees? I agree with others that politics comes into play and that's why there's only one CR from USA, but it also seems like we don't have nearly as deep a bench as past cycles. And that's where my argument comes in. Maybe there's just a lag and these new opportunities for female referees haven't born fruit yet. But I suspect that the issue is deeper and not fixed just by providing additional opportunities. Thinking about a set of things we would all agree on: 1. We don't have enough referees. 2. Too many young referees quit refereeing. 3. Many referees quit because of abuse from parents and coaches. 4. Fewer women than men become a referee. And then, this is debatable and I don't have evidence, but suspect to be true: 5. A disproportionate number of female referees quit when young than male referees. If 5 holds true, then I would argue that anything that addresses 5 also addresses 1-4 and we should therefore address 5 as part of fixing 1-4.
As you may recall, I have a different perspective on referee turnover. I disagree with rh89's third point. Over 60% of all USSF referees are under the age of 19. Yes, some quit because of parents and/or coaches yelling at them. But almost all of said referees are or have been players themselves. They knew that referees sometimes get yelled at before they ever took the entry level class. The single largest reason for referee turnover, by far, is graduating from high school. After that, they don't have time anymore. They're working or going to college, they have a boyfriend/girlfriend, studying, etc. In my state (and no one has told me that their state is significantly different) we go from 60% of referees being 14 to 18 years old to about 2% being 19 to 25 years old. Yes, the number of female referees is nowhere near the number of male referees, in any age cohort. So you take that drop off in registration due to not being a teenager anymore and, depending on the size of your state, the 2% remaining may round out to zero female referees in that age range. The other thing I will point out is that, after high school, you don't see any significant number of female players, either. For example, we have a very active college club league, with a number of schools having to hold tryouts to choose who will make the club team. All men. No school has been able to form a women's club team. Our adult women's league is almost all players in their 30's, 40's and 50's. There are virtually no players in their 20's. It looks like kind of a cultural thing that women lose interest in team sports after high school. YMMV.
Thanks for engaging, @Law5. I'd love to see some more statistics. Any chance you have the following information? 1. % Referees 13-16 2. % Referees 17-18 3. Male/female breakdown for all ages My hypothesis is that college isn't the factor that causes referees to quit, it's earlier while they're still in high school. Some of this also comes from person experience, as I quit in high school (didn't like the coaches/parents and general responsibility) and picked it up again when I was 25, to find I was quite good at it and enjoyed it. One of the biggest changes I found was how I was treated by coaches and parents, not being some little runt on the field but an actual adult, and I want that level of respect afforded to referees of all ages.
Knowing that before and dealing with the reality of it actually happening and how it affects you psychologically are two different things so I disagree with you there. I agree that local assignors don't do nearly enough work to help their graduating HS referees find an assignor wherever they are going to college and stay involved. SRCs as a whole should be doing a better job at making sure this happens.
I retired as SRA after 10 years and I don't seem to be able to find the Excel file where I had the data. I do remember that grade 9 was almost 50-50 male-female but grade 8 was more like 75-25 and grade 7 was roughly 95-5. I don't recall the division between 14 to 16 year olds and 17&18 year olds. However, I did check non-renewal percentages by year of experience. There was no difference between first year referees not renewing versus second and third years not renewing. I take that to be evidence that people yelling at referees is not a significant reason for non-renewals. We did attempt to ask those who had not renewed why. Frankly, we got very few responses. Those that did respond were heavily towards "I don't have time anymore" and "injured/out of shape." Note that I'm not saying being yelled at is not a cause at all for non-renewal, only that it is not a big one. As far as the college aged are concerned, it is my experience that many of them do not have a car and, therefore, can not get to games. Our SRC did e-mail referees who appeared to be of high school leaving age and offer to connect them to the SRC/assignors at their college. I'd say that the response rate was less than 2%. And, just an observation in passing, of those 18/19 year olds who did renew, it was apparent that in a number of cases it was mom who sent in the renewal form. Every year, I would have moms call me to ask if they could sign the form for their kid because little Johnny was away at school. Note that, for their first fall at college, they are still registered for that year. I will agree that USSF's registration system does not handle temporary addresses (like college addresses) at all. And, for what it's worth, Cal South does not accept your USSF registration. You have to register with Cal South also and pay a new fee. And, another hurdle, in some states, like mine, you must have concussion recognition and management training annually before you can referee in that state. So, if you are coming from a non-training state, there's another thing you have to do before you can be assigned and some percentage of people will just never quite get around to it.
(Not exactly WWC-related, but I doubt I'm qualified to make a new thread...) Some Law 12 news - refs are clamping down in the English WSL. As decreed by David Elleray - http://dailycannon.com/2019/01/referees-to-clamp-down-in-fa-wsl-and-fa-wc/ (Archived) In a London derby, a foul caused Scotland's star player Kim Little a broken fibula - Chelsea's Drew Spence received a yellow card: Arsenal and Scotland midfielder Kim Little has suffered a broken leg and will be out for up to 10 weeks after a challenge during Sunday's match against Chelsea. pic.twitter.com/4hdebjiA0t— Jo Currie (@JoCurrie) October 16, 2018
Confirmed that VAR will be at the WWC: CONFIRMED: The FIFA Council today ratified that Video Assistant Referees (VAR) WILL be used at the #FIFAWWC this summer in France. pic.twitter.com/qSX10wIGjL— FIFA Women's World Cup (@FIFAWWC) March 15, 2019 It could be interesting as I don't think any women's leagues have VAR, even though the WWC referees did just have on-the-field training with VAR at a youth boys' tournament in Abu Dhabi.
That is interesting, especially since there otherwise seems to have been great efforts to only use refs in VAR tournaments who have experience with VAR. I wonder how much of the decision was made because it's a good decision and how much to avoid another black eye for treating the women worse than the men (see turf fields controversy).
So UEFA won’t even let Michael Oliver and other top referees touch VAR, despite extensive training including top-level live matches. Meanwhile FIFA is going to try it on a World Cup with referees who have—barring a couple small exceptions—zero experience. I’m not sure a decision could better demonstrate the divergent approaches of these two organizations.
This should bode well for Koroleva (USA). She has had VAR training here in the US, and according to the PRO website, she worked as a VAR on 5 MLS matches last year.
The use of VAR at the women's World Cup is down purely to public pressure no matter how illprepared or inexperienced the referees are at the event. UEFA, itself, knows that VAR is not ready for the CL but they caved to public demand and implemented it for the knockout stages. They just didn't want to deal with the public outrage and complaints of someone incorrect decision occurring and people complaining "well, why don't they have VAR..." This is exactly the same thing. FIFA doesn't want Grant Wahl and the USWMNT complaining about an incorrect decision and crying sexism.
Agreed UEFA caved to public demand in implementing for the 2019 knockout stages, but they really just brought something forward that was bound to happen for the 2019-2020 season. I actually think they are being over-cautious by denying guys like Oliver and Hategan assignments at this point. FIFA's cave is much more overtly political and for the reasons you suggest. Now, as I think I've said in the past, the argument can and should be made that FIFA was derelict in not training female officials in VAR either from the beginning or starting immediately in early 2017, once it was clear World Cup 2018 would likely have VARs. If for some reason the VAR experiment got disbanded (never likely to happen, but hypothetically let's say it could have) the worst case scenario was you wasted 12-18 months and 3-4 seminars training female referees who would then never use VAR. By not engaging in that training early, FIFA has been left in a position where it has almost no female referees prepared at all to use VAR. Also, let's not forget that FIFA spent over 2 years training the same crop of 53+ male referees for VAR use, selected 36 referees and 13 specialist VARs and then when push came to shove allowed about 7 of them to actually perform the decision-making duty of a main VAR. So if 2 years of training 53+ officials leads to a trusted group of 7, how many trusted VARs will 3 months of training 27 officials yield? It is a recipe for disaster, but the political perceptions outweigh the practical implications here and it's not even close. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Irrati and Makkelie spend a good portion of their summer in France as "instructors."
It will be interesting to see who ends up getting used as VARs. FIFA may very well create for itself this summer the recurring optic of male VARs reviewing female centers' decisions.
Maybe. Or maybe we will see enhanced use of OFR to be sure that the optics show the R on the field in control, even on things that typically would not have OFR. But I'm inclined to agree with MR above that we're likely to see some experienced VARs there as instructors/advisers/mentors, and that the may even be in the rume as AVARs, but leaving the VAR as a women's official.
Yeah. VAR was always going to be implemented for the 2019-2020 season in the CL, but there really was no need to have it for this season's knockout stages other than just to cave to public pressure. The EPL has been able to make it this season without VAR without the sky falling so I think UEFA could have gone through the knockout phases without VAR this season.
With such little time to train female officials as VARs, there is bound to be multiple major issues at this summer's WWC. We see VARs who have had much more experience still make awful decisions. Now FIFA is going to throw a bunch of referees with no VAR experience into the most competitive soccer environment there is. If (when) something goes wrong this summer, FIFA will be solely to blame.
[QUOTE="RedStar91, post: 37615631, member: 193990”]The EPL has been able to make it this season without VAR without the sky falling so I think UEFA could have gone through the knockout phases without VAR this season.[/QUOTE]Insurance though, right? Nothing disastrous so far. But let’s say VAR ensures the wrong team doesn’t advance to the UCL Final but the lack of it in May results in the wrong team winning the EPL. It all comes down to that one moment. Of course, you, me and most people that read this forum are tuned in enough to realize VAR could also miss a critical error or even make things worse in some situations. But for this grave injustices, UEFA is covered in May. England isn’t.
They did start training female referees in VAR back in 2016, in seminars attended by both male and female referees gearing up for the 2018 and 2019 World Cups. I don't know how many of the FIFA referee seminars over the past few years were jointly attended by male and female referees, but at least some of them were. The women's biggest hangup is that so very few of them have match experience with VAR (outside of the matches in Abu Dhabi) since women's leagues are not using it.
It isn't going to happen but I really wish they would use the tennis tiebreak system on matches which go to PKs. Also called ABBA (as opposed to ABAB, the conventional system). One team goes first, but then the next team takes 2 PKs in a row (just like serving in a tennis tiebreaker) and then they continue to alternate taking 2 PKs in a row. It was used at Algarve and you can still see a little history on the web from the Canada/Sweden 3rd place match. It starts about 2:52:00 in the video. I'm trying to find the name of the referee but so far I haven't found it. https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1YqxorRleOvJv
The ABBA experiment was deemed a failure and discontinued. So definitely not going to happen. But a little birdie has told me you’re going to see male VARs (in the main VAR role). So get ready for that!