I’m not sure I follow what you’re getting at here. Can you explain more explicitly what are the signals that are being sent to those referees (and what the alternative signal would be)? Is it as simple as “go ahead and help PRO during the lockout” vs “stand in solidarity with PSRA” or are you getting at something deeper?
Congratulations to these individuals on their first MLS matches is essentially a signal that all referees at the top levels in the US are more or less interchangeable. PSRA folks are "unavailable" this weekend? No problem, these higher level local Texas guys can fill the slots! It doesn't acknowledge any differences in ability. It's akin to the fan argument that there is no difference. So I see it as saying "once you've put your time in, you can do anything." And that's going to build the egos of the type of referee I alluded to into thinking that applies to them. Because they are a couple years out from being in the position that the replacements are today. That training and dedication of the PSRA (both BU1 and BU2) officials is just ignored. People who don't (or in some cases can't) pass fitness tests can do MLS now. It's totally fine! Don't worry about training or working your way up through the necessary matches. Or learning anything directly from the people who administer referees at the professional level. That's all out the window. Now that it does seem this work stoppage could go on for quite sometime, I think it's worth pointing out that "success" by the replacements undermines both PRO's reason for existence and all the work its done since its incepetion. Perceived or claimed success doesn't just embarrass PSRA, it is a giant blackmark on PRO itself. Because if the replacements are servicable (or better) in the eyes of stakeholders, what on earth is the point of all the recruitment and training and education done via PRO? That's where my mind goes when I see the tweet above. The NTX is implicitly saying none of that matters and just congratulating people who have "made it" to MLS without any of it. The cohort of referees I referenced see that and take that message. The alternative message would be that it does matter.
I know this doesn’t have an apples to apples take, but I grew up in a business that was heavily unionized, and I was a white collar worker. But, I benefited a great deal from what the union bargained for and went out on strike for. Health care, pensions, vacation time, and salaries all trickled down from what the unions bargained for. That era in American businesses is done, but I will forever be grateful to those who bargained and struck so that everyone benefited. In my business, it all eroded right around the end of the century. The companies I worked for whittled down those jobs as the technology improved.
Feels the same as Dickerson’s interview where he gave the passing “I wish them well” sandwiched between minutes of talking about how much effort and sacrifice he gave to get to that level, clearly an undercurrent of “these people do not belong to be here with us and I’m pretty upset that people crossed the line”, his PR statement of well wishing notwithstanding. Unfortunately seems like now this lockout IS starting to affect associations and relationships lower down the pyramid where lines are starting to be drawn when a lot of people felt that this wouldn’t trickle down. Like this, the Texas person writing it might honestly have not been trying to undermine PSRA at all, didn’t mean to imply that PRO’s work is useless, just figured that he has referees working in MLS so he wanted to congratulate them, but now a line in the sand is drawn and showing any support for your replacement referees in MLS is now seen as stomping down on all PSRA refs and PRO as a whole. Really starting to be a sad situation and the longer it goes on, I assume relationships can get even more strained
As @MassachusettsRef said - if the extra training, fitness requirements and professionalism doesn't actually matter then what is MLS and NWSL paying the PRO executives for?
Careful…telling people to consider relationships is what got Chris penso in trouble. In all seriousness, this is what he and others were warning replacements about. North Texas is stocked with bu1 and bu2 members who offer their time as mentors for free and act as examples for the region to show its strength of refereeing. You can feel any way you want about replacements taking games but it is unequivocally a fact that they are doing so at a disadvantage to the pro and pro2 members who worked hard to be there already. Celebrating one set of your constituents while alienating another is taking a bold line when he was never forced to choose. Good luck getting your most experienced officials now to volunteer which negatively impacts all officials, not just the ones that crossed.
Very well-written. It is a sad time in American soccer refereeing, and it gets sadder the longer this goes on. Like you said, it’s like football is telling referees that all the work they put in doesn’t matter. But we know that if anyone is watching closely it does matter. Yet no one in the league seems to care about that. This is asking a lot of difficult, deep questions about referees’ role in modern times. Do people care about actually good refereeing (referees who make big mistakes less often, referees who put themselves in the best position to make informed decisions), or do they just care about public perception of refereeing? Sections of the public seem to be aligned with the replacement referees because they already dislike the regular referees; it feels very tribal and full of confirmation bias. Does truth matter, or does popularity?
I said this specifically about my own feelings with it, that while I feel like I want to support all referees, by hoping that the replacements do well, it would inherently be denigrating everything PSRA refs have done and what fair treatment referees deserve, so I wanted the replacements to crash and burn, which would make me seem like a jerk wanting to see my fellow refs fail. It’s an extremely difficult situation to be in and overall I think it was pretty dumb for a state association to take any stand or statement whatsoever. But I also think it’s very unfair that just by showing support to their replacements from the association that suddenly now they are anti-PSRA and anti-fair wages and benefits, that really doesn’t seem right. Why do you guys think that they are now saying that all the work PSRA refs have put in is useless? Just because people in the league aren’t outright coming out saying how horrible the referees are all the time? I’ve asked myself the same question, if people would rather referees be excellent but correctly make calls against their team, or if a ref was poor but gave incorrect calls in their favor.
You don’t have to want them to fail to support PSRA. In fact PSRA is not telling you to root against them. The fact that they are failing in so many objective measures (both kmi and non kmi events) has validated how good the officials are and how strong the development is. but while you dont need to root against them, you don’t have to celebrate them either. They’re doing their thing with all the positives and negatives that come with it. It’s their decision and while many will have their opinion, someone was going to do them.
Unfortunately, the measure of success isn't in the form of any sort of assessment of the referee's performance, but it is in a much less intangible measure of how well the league is able to progress with the replacements. That is an incredibly fuzzy metric. A bad call on a throw in isn't going to move the needle at all. Nothing signals any of this will be resolved anytime soon, which is unfortunate, especially for the ARs who are due for a significant increase.
Any idea how the assessment process is with them? Anyone who knows anything can see the overall drop-off but VAR is there to catch a lot of it.
I never saw PSRA say to not root against them, all PSRA said was that they don’t advocate referee abuse against them. Rooting against their success (ex. Seeing them perform badly and laugh about it) is different from actively abusing them (ex. Harassing them in person/on their social media accounts). And I’m sorry but I can’t separate wanting replacements to do well vs. not supporting PSRA. If you want to see the replacements do well, you would inherently be saying that the games are easy enough to be able to do with no training and therefore undermining PSRA referees. You just saw how people reacted to a state association merely congratulating their referees who did games and how by congratulating them, they are inherently throwing in the trash all the years of work and sacrifice PSRA refs have done to say how training and fitness and game experience is unnecessary. After two weeks, There seems to be a clear line in the sand that people have to pick a side on that the Texas Facebook post showed. You are either on the side of PSRA and dislike anyone who crosses the line and want to see these crossers fail, or you are actively against PSRA and everything they are standing for. You have to want to see the replacements fail because it will be a bigger pressure to get the refs back. If you want to see the replacements do well, then this will in itself mean the league is less inclined to pass a CBA and keeps the PSRA locked out for longer Unfortunately there isn’t really a middle ground anymore and it’s going to get worse as the lockout drags on
You’re right. It’s hard to quantify. But that throw in isn’t the problem. Why didn’t they call the game after the throw in or after possession changed 2-3 times? The var would have known it was very incorrect and can say that. Why didn’t they call a simple foul to avoid controversy? The corner happened well after expired time which pro had a directive for. Why not call it there or why not call a foul for melia? you’re right a throw in at midfield is just a throw in at midfield and psra can never say “remember Seattle Austin last July when a controversial goal didn’t happen bc our officials got a throw in right and ended the game on time?” But it’s exactly those soft things in addition to many others that make them the best. They avoid more errors than we’ll ever know about
A couple of observations after the first couple of weeks of this situation. First: members of this board accurately predicted that it wasn't going to be a single "Fail Mary" event that took down the replacement referees in one shot, but instead potentially a preponderance of smaller events that crumbled them bit by bit. What we didn't accurately predict, though, was the experiment we're living through, which is this one: is a model where you have a much larger pool of adequate enough referees, backed by an exceedingly-well-trained VAR team who will actively engage in KMI's, good enough for a professional league? From another angle: if we choose not to use "number of VAR involvements" as a standard of measurement, and decide that we're fine to have substantially more of them if the decisions end up being correct, could we be satisfied with the product? This wasn't a question any of us were expecting to ask - nobody else, to my knowledge, has tried it - and I think it's fair to say that, two weeks in and in the minds of people who matter most, we don't know the answer. I expect that is creating a fair amount of angst for both PRO and PSRA leaders. Nobody wanted or asked for that model - and, by the way, there are lots of reasons that this model might not be sustainable - and yet, here we are, seeing it tested in real time. Second: I do think this situation is making plain that there are a _ton_ of people who feel hard done by the US identification and training process for PRO-level referees, and they're perfectly willing to use this opportunity to prove themselves right, at least to themselves. (I'm saying the US process because that's where this is happening, but I'm not saying that this is unique to the US, or that referees in other countries wouldn't feel the same way about their own processes.) I'm not sure there is anything to be done about this - if (as in our current model) you are going to have limited spots at the top of a pyramid, there will always be people who never get to that top - but any of us who have been around for a while have heard or lived a version of @RedStar91's story, where one actor in the system seemed to halt their progress, and there is something very humbling about watching people leapfrog those actors, even if they were likely right more often than wrong. Third: this is, in my experience, a unique community online: I don't know another community with a relatively small number of active members who include both a fair number of folks who've participated at the very highest levels nationwide or worldwide (some here anonymously), members who are true hobbyists, and many in between, who generally listen to and are excellent to each other. It's easy to forget that's happening here, and the latest dustup about the hotel or whatever is a real reminder that people's livelihoods are integrated in all of this. We should hold ourselves to high standards about what we do and don't say.
even if this so-called "model" yields acceptable results on the field (it doesn't) it's entirely unworkable in the long run. even if we forget about the fact that there has been nothing resembling an AVAR in any VOR this year, PRO management doesn't have enough personnel to keep the VORs operating this way over the long term even in this limited capacity. so sure, maybe a league can get what they deem to be acceptable results in the short-term using this "model" of having referee management officiate the games by proxy, but it's absolutely not practical beyond a few weeks of this. there's no way that Geiger, the Andersons, Fletcher, Barkey, et al are going to keep doing this for months on end.
So I think one of the factors here to contemplate is the nature of MLS fandom. It is--with some exceptions, of course--largely club focused. There are not that many "MLS fans" the way there are NFL or NBA fans. Or, more importantly for us, EPL fans. Because if the EPL had the number of reviews per week that we were experiencing right now, the media in England (and the soccer media worldwide) would be apoplectic. But MLS can skate by because maybe each club is seeing a review every other week instead of (on average) every 4-5 weeks. For each somewhat dedicated fan, the change here simply isn't that noticeable. Now, you rightly allude to this probably not being sustainable. From a personnel standpoint, it's just really hard (note we still don't have official AVARs). Things are getting missed. Delays aren't appropriately happening for checks. So maybe it all comes into sharper focus at some point. But you're correct that it's something the powers that be can stomach and get by with for now. I think I disagree with this. Or at least your use of the term "ton." The fact is that PRO has struggled mightily to find the people to fill spots here. They have done it so far, but they are stretched very thin. It's not like they are turning people away. And the personnel is not, on the whole, dominated by people who can say they were passed over. It is very mixed. That group is there (Weiner, Rosano, Chavdarov, etc.) but you also have people who were simply never in the discussion and have moved here recently from overseas (Lezama, Bonilla, several of the ARs, etc.). You then definitely have people who are younger and are taking the opportunity to jump in earlier than they could have. So the people you allude to are there, but I don't even think you can say, when you look at the group as a whole, that even half of them qualify as being "hard done by the US identification and training process." The names we see across two weeks now just don't bear that out. If anything, I'd maybe argue the opposite. I think the fact that PRO has had to resort to so many names who are of recent foreign origin or below the BU2/on-the-radar level illustrates that people think the system is largely working for them. Obviously there are exceptions. And then there are decisions we can always debate (like Da Silva being promoted before others last year). But I think that if there was widespread discontent with the process, you'd see a lot of different names filling the gaps right now. Well said and agreed.
I think that the American sports culture of mainly NFL but also NBA having tons of video replay delays in games is heavily working against PSRA in this lockout. EPL fans and many other soccer fans worldwide despise VAR because of the delays it is causing to their games, and it seems like a lot of them would actually trade in getting decisions wrong for limiting or eliminating the delays VAR is causing. But American sorts fans are so used to delays already in our other sports that they don’t care about having 2-4x as many VAR monitor decisions. Even though this is direct evidence that the replacements are missing a lot of things and thy need to keep getting bailed out, the MLS fans only see the end result of “oh well the decision was fixed anyway so who cares if there’s 5+ minute stoppage time every game”
this is a good point, but "heavily working against PSRA" exaggerates the significance of fan perception/opinion in the negotiations. unless you mean it's heavily working against PSRA specifically with respect to fan perception/opinion, in which case I'd probably agree with that
Yeah I meant with respect to the fan/media perception of the necessity of PRO refs and why there isn’t as much outcry against the multiples more times VAR keeps getting consulted. Like mass said, if EPL games had this many VAR delays, fans and the media would be beside themselves. But I think the American sports fans and audience don’t care as much. Or maybe with the media, it’s because MLS specifically is banning media from complaining about it
Also deleted from NTX's twitter was a post congratulating the referees who attended the last PRO pre-season camp in January. Oh boy...
USL League 1 assignment for Sat Mar 9 South Georgia Tormenta vs Central Valley Fuego Tormenta Stadium (7:30PM ET) REF: Kyle Johnston AR1: Jarred Mosher AR2: Kevin Huet 4TH: Izlen Peksenar Is this the same Kyle Johnston that worked as the referee for FC Dallas and Montreal last week? Interesting