Honest question: I’m a longtime premier league fan from the US. In my over 10 years of watching English football, I’ve never seen a person of color as the center referee in a premier league match. Does anyone know why this is? A significant percentage (majority) of premier league players are not white, and given research around subconscious bias, you have to imagine the league and refereeing body would have an interest in having their game officials be representative of the players they officiate? With the quality of officiating being in the news so much recently, increasing diversity in the ranks of game officials could be one idea. I imagine it’s just a big old boys club though…
People can pretend it has nothing to do with race, but they’d be completely full of shit. I am not saying that the institution itself is racist, although I am sure they have some prejudicial practices that they may be unaware of, but it starts from the bottom.
I cannot tell you the amount vitriol I received as a CHILD reffing games. Now, imagine you are trying to go through the ranks of Sunday leagues, conference league games, and hopefully up to the professional ranks. Imagine the racial abuse you’d receive if you were a person of color. We can’t protect our own players from receiving racial abuse. Saka, Sancho, and Rashford levels of racial abuse from Euros would be every single weekend with referees of color. Anytime they made a game-changing decisions, there would be fans racially abusing those refs. It is already happening at lower levels, and they drop out.
In America, I was given a stat that something like 60% of refs would quit after their first year and 85% wouldn’t last longer than 4 years. That is an abysmal retention and attrition rates.
I am old enough to remember Uriah Rennie, but he was reffing before social media. Now it is only worse because the abuse isn’t limited to on the pitch.