Tuesday Obituary: The Referee

by Sahar Tavakoli.

Final whistle: The FIFA Referee is dead. Following a long decline that began around September of 2016, the appointed field magistrate was knocked out on July 5th, 2026.

In association football, a team comprises eleven players: ten outfield players and one goalkeeper. Collectively, the fans (especially a home crowd) have a supporting role as the “twelfth man.” Brought into this arithmetic, the unlucky Referee would come in at a fitting number thirteen.

Rarely liked and intermittently respected, their official role would be to enforce the Laws of the Game: protecting players on the field, regulating match play, disciplining misconduct, and preserving the integrity of o jogo bonito. But they also served as football’s whipping boy, blamed for what they saw and what they missed, for the calls they made and the whistles they swallowed, for the cards they dealt and those kept in pocket. Sometimes they made mistakes. Their authority, after all, came not of  omniscience, but from situated, embodied, and immediate judgement.

Harry Collins, Robert Evans and Christopher Higgins’ 2017 Bad Call: Technology’s Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It examines the rising adoption of video and line-calling technologies in games of tennis, cricket, and football. Scholars from the field of Science and Technology Studies approach such technologies as disruptions to what had previously been adequately functioning systems of adjudication. Rather than promoting fairness in gameplay or streamlining decision-making, these mechanical busybodies replace judgement with the mere promise of measurement, conflating technical precision with justice. Video is useful, they argue, if it can corroborate injustice on the field. It is a hindrance, if not corrosive agent, when it introduces new vantage points from which new offences can be created.

When FIFA introduced the Video Assistant Referee—or VAR—into the adjudication of gameplay in 2016, they offered the Referee not an assist, but a studs-up challenge to the shins. The VAR would less offer a more detailed view of football than inaugurate a new version of the game. In 1863, Ebenezer Cobb Morley, the first secretary of the Football Association, established the offside rule to prevent unfair attacking advantage. The VAR era reimagines it as a kind of border control in favour of the defender. Rather than asking whether an attacker has meaningfully profited from trespassing beyond the line of play, VAR body-shames. 

VAR’s newfound jurisdiction would not end here. It would retrospectively cancel goals and introduce new fouls. When needed, it would disappear.

FIFA’s Referees Committee once appointed the Referee to keep watch over a team sport. Under FIFA’s direction, his murder, too, would be organised as a team effort. Already weakened by VAR, the Referee received their final execution order from the duum-ass duumvirate of Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump. Unsatisfied with the red card shown to Folarin Balogun in the United States’ Men’s National Team’s’s match against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1st and the one-match ban that followed, the President of the United States demanded a review from the President of FIFA. On July 5th, a Truth Social post announced a new ruling. The ban disappeared, and with it went the Ref.