‘Social contract’ fans have forgotten as abuse drives officials to the brink
Updated . First published at
To the good people that contribute to all of our wonderful community and professional sports, this is not an attack on you; this is an indictment of those that have dragged us all down into the position we find ourselves in across the world.
Every weekend, match officials pull on the jersey and take charge of games. Every season since the lockdowns ended, the job has become harder.
Projectiles are thrown at the referees at Eden Park following an NRL semi final. Twitter
Not the rules. Not the fitness. But what is now tolerated as acceptable behaviour.
Sideline sprays that once would have cleared a ground now barely raise an eyebrow. Players square up over penalty calls. Spectators wait by the gate. The aggression is sharper, more personal and more frequent than anything seen before 2020.
This is not just an Australian sport problem. It is a global collapse of the social contract between people at large but also between people and the officials who make sport possible.
Match officials came into existence largely because teams and captains could not and/or would not agree when disagreements occurred; instead of holding themselves to a higher standard, they outsourced the decision making and law enforcing to a third-party who would absorb all the blame.
Personal accountability was left behind and this perpetuated hostility and animosity towards those that ensure the game is played by the rules.
Match officials make mistakes. There have been officials that have acted in bad faith. Most don’t, yet are treated as guilty so long as it supports the narrative one wants to believe. The social contract between players, coaches, fans to and from match officials is both broken and cast aside to the point where it is not part of the zeitgeist.
Social contract is an old idea with a simple meaning: we each strengthen our personal freedoms via shared, agreed upon rules, followed by our own volition rather than force, or even law; it is individual to individual and, when normalised by enough, becomes collective by extension.
In community and most sport, the deal was always clear. The referee gives up their weekend to enforce the rules of a game they love. In return, players, coaches and spectators accept the decisions, grumble (politely) and shake hands. “...and one for the ref; hip, hip hooray”.
Nobody had to like every call. Everybody had to respect the person making it and most officials both earned and wore it.
That deal has been torn up around the world. Soccer, infamous for its treatment of match officials, is no longer the exception.
Take rugby union, a code built on respect for the referee. Only the captain speaks. The official is “sir”. Yet the New Zealand Herald recently laid bare a referee abuse crisis in Wellington.
Just two months ago, there was no community rugby union in Wellington; the officials staged their own lockout. If it can happen in union’s heartland, it can happen anywhere.
In America, baseball umpires are walking out and not coming back. In an open letter to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, veteran umpire Jim Bettencourt cited National Federation of State High School Associations figures: more than 50,000 officials gone since 2018-19, more than 70 per cent of those who quit citing parent and coach abuse, and an average official age of nearly 57, up from the mid-20s in the 1970s.
Nobody wants to inherit the abuse, especially the youth that are intended to step into these roles.
The Daily Telegraph reported on the Balmain Rugby League Referees’ Association, which has honourably served the game for more than a century but has now lost 30 referees in three years.
This sounds small but when one considered how few referees are, it is a monumental loss with many games kicking off with a parent holding the whistle because nobody else will.
Balmain, like many associations, now dresses its under-18 referees in green socks so ground managers can remind adults they are screaming at a child. Netball Victoria does the same with green armbands.
Sit with that. We need coloured socks and armbands to remind grown men and women not to abuse children.
By extension, does this mean there should be something for adult match officials to remind these same people not to abuse them too?
It is not that simple and part of this is because there is no study showing whether the green socks/armbands protect youth, highlight them as a target, or do little to nothing. Money well spent for those that commit to the research.
Cricket has fared better, though umpires’ associations report the temperature rising there too, with more boilovers. The quietest game on the calendar is not immune.
Why now? Because the lockdowns broke something. For two years, the everyday habits that hold the social contract together (queuing, sharing space, deferring to umpires, teachers and flight attendants) simply stopped. The world reopened and too many people came back angrier, upset, more entitled and/or out of practice at dealing with others.
This does not exclude individuals in match officiating associations but the direction of targeting is overwhelming in the other direction. An akin analogy is a ripple against the ocean’s waves. It exists but only to be overwhelmed by a stronger, angrier tide.
This hostility is not only sports. Airlines logged record numbers of unruly passengers. Retail workers, nurses and teachers copped unprecedented abuse. Match officials are simply sport’s front line of a regression that swept across countries and industries.
And the institutions that should hold the line have gone soft. Not just the highest profile administrating bodies but local as well. Weak judiciaries across many sports now forgive what used to be unforgivable. Behaviour that once meant a season on the sidelines draws a quiet word; sometimes not even a slap on the wrist. Every downgraded charge, every “good bloke who had a bad day” verdict, teaches the next offender that the social contract is optional.
It is not enough to repeat the tired line that “there is no game without the ref”. Everyone nods along and nothing changes. Slogans do not protect a 16-year-old with a whistle, nor the mum or dad out there for their kids or their love of the game. Consistency and enforcement do.
That means returning to pre-lockdown expectations, enforcement and penalties. Life bans for threatening officials. Real suspensions for dissent. Clubs accountable for their sidelines. A lost registration fee is a smaller price than a lost generation of referees. If that doesn’t move the needle, a lawsuit from an injured, or worse, match official might.
The social contract endures, now marginally compared to before, but it has never been self-enforcing, in sport or society. It held because good behaviour was the norm and consequences followed breaches. Aviation, retail and classrooms must rebuild their standards. Sport must too.
Every code in every country draws from the same shrinking pool of people willing to risk not just their time but their safety. The green socks and armbands, the resignation letters, quiet quitting, and the umpire statistics all say the same thing.
The contract is in tatters. Enforce it like we used to, or get used to games without referees and umpires. Match officials only exist because, when the games were codified in the 1800s, teams couldn’t settle disagreements themselves. Games without referees is exactly where it started and, without meaningful change, will end as we have already seen occur more and more.
Dr Spencer Kassimir is a rugby league referee, cricket umpire and Harvard Business School alumnus who works in global markets within the sports industry and lectures in sports business and ethics.
