Anthony Taylor has told us what we needed to hear about VAR and managerial abuse - but will anyone listen?
It was “the worst situation I've dealt with in terms of abuse," according to Premier League referee Anthony Taylor – being screamed at and abused, along with his family, by furious AS Roma fans in Budapest after the 2023 Europa League final.
In a new interview with BBC Sport, Taylor opened up about the experience of being on the receiving end of the worst of the shocking behaviours that have become entrenched within football, and about the ways in which VAR has, if anything, worsened a situation that was already escalating at a worrying pace.
Much of the rage that Taylor, along with his wife and children, experienced on that day may have been whipped up by José Mourinho, the former Chelsea and Manchester United manager whose vitriolic responses to officiating decisions have previously been a factor in causing a prominent referee to retire after he received a slew of death threats.
Between the introduction of VAR and the continuously vicious behaviour of managers like Mourinho – and players – referees are now subject to more scrutiny and more abuse than ever before, and Taylor’s interview highlighted the urgent need for a change in attitudes among fans, the media, and among those involved in playing and coaching the game at the highest level.
Anthony Taylor’s interview speaks to the need to change behaviours at the top level
Speaking further on the abuse he faced that night in Hungary, Taylor rightly observed that “it also highlights the impact of people's behaviour on others. Even in a match like that, where there was actually no major mistakes in the game."
Taylor implicitly criticised Mourinho, now managing Benfica in his homeland, for trying to “shift focus on to somebody to blame.” Mourinho had repeatedly described Taylor as “a disgrace” in the wake of the defeat to Sevilla.
"For me, that's a great source of disappointment, frustration, anger. Why that's acceptable, I don't know - because I'm sure those individuals wouldn't like somebody to turn around and say that to them or their own children. It makes you reflect back on whether you made a mistake travelling with your family in the first place. They haven't been to [a game] since."
When it comes to using aggressive and inflammatory language towards officials, Mourinho is one of the worst repeat offenders in football. His angry response to the decisions made during Chelsea’s infamous Champions League semi-final defeat to Barcelona in 2005 may have played a part in fans sending a string of death threats to Swedish referee Anders Frisk. Frisk retired shortly afterwards as a consequence, just six months after he had been pictured bleeding from the head after being struck by a coin thrown by Roma fans during a Champions League match against Dynamo Kyiv.
Mourinho is far from the only culprit, of course, but the incidents partially sparked by the way in which he has reacted to refereeing decisions across his career have highlighted the role that the reactions of coaches and players towards officials can spark recrimination, outrage and even violence.
"The lengths that people go to post-game with a lot of things now to spread false narratives, to spread malicious conspiracy theories... it creates a hugely negative environment for people to operate in,” Taylor continued, adding that he was concerned about the effect that the now-standardised anger in the stands and on social media to every perceived ‘mistake’ might have on referees’ mental health.
He was also, justly, concerned about the impact the dire behaviour often exhibited at the top level of the game was having on grassroots football.
“Every single weekend you can go to any local park across the UK and you can see a parent on the sideline verbally abusing a young referee. That's not an environment conducive to people getting better. I don't understand how people think that's acceptable."
The truth is that it has become accepted behaviour right across the sport. Every contentious decision is filtered through the lens of our bias as fans, but now – thanks both to the unchecked behaviour of managers and players and the equally unchecked actions of people on social media – the default response isn’t frustration but rage. Referees are abused and derided on a daily basis.
Mourinho was banned for four matches for his comments in the wake of the Europa League final, but it’s hardly the kind of punishment that changes behaviours. We have fallen very far from the famous Brian Clough interview with John Motson when he took the media to task, telling Motson that what they did to referees was “nothing short of criminal.”
That attitude – that referees are human beings making difficult and often subjective decisions under immense pressure, and deserve grace for potential errors – is no longer something found within the game. Instead, repulsive aggression has taken its place and become normalised. It’s not only deleterious and potentially dangerous to referees, but also serves to put people off becoming involved in officiating in the first place, and a smaller pool of potential referees is a surefire way to reduce the overall quality of officiating.
“Perfection doesn't exist,” as Taylor rightly put it. “We're expecting referees to get every decision right. It is really important that we actually start to talk about people being fearful of failure or mistakes. We have to accept that if we don't create the right environment for people to thrive, then people will be fearful, and that will have a negative impact on individuals and performance in the long term."
Why VAR has only made everything worse
Another subject of the interview with Taylor was the introduction of VAR – and his comments highlight the likelihood that the added layer of scrutiny has only worsened the situation.
Taylor said that the introduction of video technology has “completely shifted” expectations around refereeing: "It brought this expectation of perfection that it would solve absolutely everybody's problems and it would be a utopia.
"In reality, those people were way off the mark. One week, people will say: 'We don't want VAR to be too forensic.' The next week they'll be going: 'How has VAR not intervened in this?'
"People really need to decide what they want. You can't one week say, 'we don't want to get involved because it ruins the flow of the game' and the next week turn round and say, 'this is a disgrace that VAR's not intervened here'.”
The key problem with VAR is that the majority of the rules which create contention within matches are largely subjective. Now there are two sets of officials both asked to make the same determination, with no way to ensure that they reach the same conclusion.
Was that handball deliberate? Did that tackle come in with excessive force? Would the striker bearing down on goal have got a clear goal-scoring opportunity, or might the defender have got back to cover? If you asked a hundred people who knew the rules inside out to re-officiate every major decision made in the Premier League this season, you would be unlikely to get a hundred people in agreement on any of them.
The main impact of VAR has been to lengthen the decision-making process and to filter it through a second layer of human fallibility. Objective decisions – offsides and whether the ball crossed the goal-line and so forth – can be better made by technology than by the naked eye. But subjective decisions, which make up a huge part of the rule book, never can be.
But the secondary impact of VAR is to create yet another layer of granular analysis of every decision, to create more confusion over how decisions are reached, and to increase both the pressure on and scrutiny of referees at a time when their lives are being made harder and harder – and more dangerous.
The reality is that referees at the top level are mostly very, very good at their jobs, and were they replaced by laypeople the difference would be immediately noticeable. That isn’t a thought experiment, either.
In 2012, a dispute between the NFL and the referees’ association meant that professional officials were unavailable for the first three weeks of the season. The result was chaos.
Replacements brought in from the lower levels of college sport and from high school level – experienced officials who knew the rules but who did not have the training and experience of the regulars – immediately demonstrated just how large the gap between an amateur and a professional was. Terrible decisions became commonplace, and it wasn’t long before the NFL bowed to referees’ demands and had them reinstated.
Premier League officials are some of the very best in the world. They make mistakes not because they are incompetent but because they are human – but they make far fewer mistakes than the average fan would were they parachuted in to replace them.
And because they are human, not only will they err, but they will suffer for as long as football’s governing bodies allow the cycle of heightened abuse to go on. The Mourinhos of the world need more than four-match bans to change the way they act. Fans need to be shown that the culture they are partially responsible for propagating is harmful. As long as nothing is done, the abuse will continue, referees will be driven out, the situation will worsen at grassroots level, and anger over mistakes in what is, ultimately, a game, will continue to spill over into very real violence of the kind that all too many officials up and down the football ladder have already experienced.
Continue Reading