The scourge of match official abuse

(upbeat music) Club Respects podcast, Smart Place, is where we bring the biggest problems facing Australian sport out of the darkness, and shine a light on the hot topics that nobody wants to talk about. Join me, Tardic Bayrucle, on a journey to bring sport into the modern world of respect, and to rebuild the respect for each other that we need to have, if sport is going to thrive. The abuse of match officials continues to play sport at all levels, and every code. It's part of a deeply ingrained culture that is passed down from generation to generation. Kids are carelessly nurtured through years of observation from having their parents losing the plot on the sidelines to spitting chips at the TV while watching their favorite team. Over time, we may not realize, but we all have a choice. We can either go with the status quo, using our power to punch down on match officials and punch harder when they make a mistake, or we can acknowledge that match officials love the game as much as we do. They're critical to everything running smoothly, and just like everyone else, make mistakes and learn from them. So, what's your choice? In this episode, we speak with Patrick Skane about the scourge of match official abuse. What sports codes are doing in Australia, and global movements pushing for respect. Patrick is a journalist and author, having released two books, The Big O, The Life and Times of Olson, Filipaina, and, earlier this year, Celestial Footy, The Story of Chinese Heritage Aussie Rules. He has also been writing for Club Respect on the topic of match official abuse. The sport at the Crossroad series, in particular, gives us a candid glimpse into the way different sports are dealing with this issue. While Patrick's article title, Sports Ugly Blind Spot, Abuse of Officials, is still the most popular post on our website. You've made a huge contribution to Club Respect, and it's great to have you here now. Patrick, welcome to SmartPlace. Thanks, Taric, and thank you for having me. Always good to be back and talking about one of my favourite issues. Fantastic. Well, you've written a number of articles for Club Respect, sent it on the abuse of match officials. What is it about this topic that makes it so important to you? Two things, one that I've had personal experience of being abused when I've filled in occasionally on refereeing my kid's soccer. And second is, I think it's a cowardly blind spot and a blight on a lot of Australian sports that in every other department, there's been amazing improvements in huge metrics and refereeing, unpiring, and match officials continues to be a low priority. And in some cases, demonised class, who are an essential service for all these sports? So I think it's cowardly. I think referees and unpires, they're just simply super fans. That's all they are. They're people that care enough to go and risk being abused. So I think they should be lionised. I think they should be treated like heroes. And they should be treated as an equal part of the game as far as respect, as players and coaches. You've researched the way different sports are responding to the crisis of match official abuse, with a deep dive into football, netball, league, union, Aussie rules, basketball, and more on the way. What's different in the way their respective associations are dealing with this crisis? I think there's a lot of best practice that's shared amongst all of the sports about campaigns, ways to increase respect. We're seeing a lot of commonalities now when parents siding code of conducts in tennis, you can see a code violation can get called on the players or players because of parent behavior. And you see a lot of campaigns that are quite similar, and no ref, no play, you know, abuse us, lose us. So I think there's a lot done on that top line awareness, but I think certainly in some sports, you come up against some cultural sacred cows, like the ability to abuse a referee is actually part of the culture, and you shouldn't meddle with a part of a culture. Now Aboriginal jokes at parties used to be part of a culture, and we have quite rightly eliminated that from the majority of public discourse because something's part of a culture doesn't mean it's a good thing. And I often talk about at a higher level dehumanization is the first step on the path to higher crimes, if it's left unchecked. And if you look at, where there's been genocides all over the world, people have been called rats or cockroaches, they get dehumanized and then it gives people a license to treat them unhumanly. And when I hear referees, you know, a good, solid, nice male or female, going out of their way to referee a game often for thrupence, for not much money, in a verging on volunteers, and you hear them get called a white maggot or something like that, people laugh away, but that's setting something very deeply into our DNA that this is acceptable behavior. So I see the sports doing a lot of stuff at the high level, but I see players, coaches, and fans still being empowered and enabled by some of the behavior they see above them. And by the fact that a lot of the associations are a bit in many ways a toothless tiger in stopping some activity, but particularly if it's a matter of personal opinion of whether something happened or not. So, you know, netball has zero tolerance. Rugby Union has got in the culture in place where the referees prized and respected. When referees retire, a big fuss is made over it. When they reach their milestones, the players give them guards of honor on their final game. Rugby Union has a real strong respect. You must call the Empire Sur. So from the start, and part of that is because rugby sees itself as representing a certain group in society that are upholding the old Corinthian sporting values. And if you look at the fact that rugby Union pretended to be amateur for 100 years, well, they're still paying under the table, but they liked being labeled with that amateur gentleman, Ethos, but it shows it can be done. And rugby Union definitely, you have to give them points for leading the way. If you look at football in Japan, when a referee retires, the players will come and, you know, do grand celebrations. So there's some cultural things there, but what we've allowed to happen is at grassroots level, abusing the ref has become normalized. It's become okay, it's become part of the culture. And it's fascinating to see how moving across different sports in writing these stories, how different sports have come up with plans to combat that. And the churn rates tell no lies. You can start at US high school sports, which has a churn rate of 80% because the abuse is at that level. You can look at Brazilian referees, churn rates around 50, 60% and in some competitions near there, they arm their referees with guns. And then there's, you know, there's a group of fans in between that say referees have to earn the respect of the players and fans. And I've never heard of anything more ridiculous in my life than that one. They should come with an absolute foundation of existing respect. They may referee a certain way. There is a whole lot of capacities and styles of refereeing that are different on the spectrum, humans are all the same. Some people weigh some things more than another and cricket some empires virtually never give LBWs. But what's fascinating is we're seeing a two tiered system develop in a lot of sports. And tennis and football are examples of that, where they're basically almost becoming separate games. Football has VAR, football has goal line technology, football now has technology that police is off sides and has cross field measurements for, you know, even down to a small part of the toe being over the line. If you get to an elite level, those skills become underdeveloped but you move two levels down. And all those poor referees down at the ground level are having to police those balls over the line just on site for maybe 10 meters away and have to rely on there. And that's a completely different refereeing experience. It's like when you make it to the elite level, you trade off getting blasted on off side, but the trade off is that you can't have social media accounts. That the abuse of you as an elite referee on your interpretations, whether someone should be sent off in what you give yellows and reds to. If you look in the English Premier League, they are told not to have social media accounts. So for just volunteering to be a referee, you can't go on social media now and interact with your friends and swap your baby photos and do all those things. At every level, there's different trade-offs depending on different pressures. Gambling has brought absurd pressure onto referees and the anger people have and the questioning and queering of certain decisions. I mean, people will just flippantly say that the referees taking money and question their integrity immediately. And that's a human that's volunteered their time. It's an outrage. So the different sports are doing it in different ways and I'm really not enjoying, but I'm fascinated to see the different things as I move through sport. I mean, look at tennis. In junior tennis, you have to umpire yourself. So there'll be a court supervisor, but there'll be no chair umpire for juniors. So you're taught about etiquette very early and all the way coming up through tennis. You have to umpire yourself. And then you call a court supervisor over and I find that fascinating that tennis is so hard on etiquette that there's virtually a junior love. There's virtually no real abuse or the physical abuse that you see that gamesmanship style by Kiros and Mackero. It's almost nonexistent because you have such strong empathy with the fact that you can't get things wrong because you're umpiring yourself. I mean, what other sport does that maybe golf? Golf and tennis sit on their own that they are played but you can't play football without a neutral where if you definitely can't play cricket without a neutral umpire, you cannot play basketball without a neutral. And have it as a competitive sport. So it's amazing that different sports come from different places and there are cultural elements that dictate how how match officials are treated. You investigate the issue from a global perspective too, focusing on the UK and the USA. What lessons can we learn in the way that it's being tackled in other countries? You would have to say with the exception of maybe one or two sports where combination of gambling and high stakes and emotional investment of fans have led to a pattern of abuse and anger when people lose their money. It's a different sort of anger than just their team losing. What something like the EPL? I mean, the death threats there was you know, there was death threats made against EPL referees to the point where we don't want to get to there. At basketball tournaments in America, they have armed security guards. We don't want to go there. But there is something I see in baseball that they have, you know, in baseball in America, they have a little area where a parent can go and talk to the referee about an interpretation is done in quite a civilized fashion. What we're talking about is coaches needing to step up. Coaches are villains in this scenario. And the good coaches are not the villains. Of course, the good coaches are the heroes that manage their players and that manage their parents. Look at Jose Marino was abusing the referee on socials and a fan takes it into their own hands. Thinking they're doing Jose Marino's work and was physically harassing a referee as he was leaving the airport after a Roma game all the way down to the coach of the under-sixers or under-7s or you know, the devil's age under 12s that confluence of being a kid and the last chance dance to get kids into the representative pathways before it gets really serious. Elite level and a grassroots level. The coach is the center of the culture, the fans and players take their cues off the coach. If the coach is always blaming the referee and not taking any blame on himself or his team members, that's it's incredibly dangerous behavior and at least a disrespect and coaches need to have a root and branch rebrand of their behavior, of their reflection because no parent will argue with a coach as a house rule with exceptions. And if the coach says to behave or we don't want to hear any negative voices, pretty much the parents will comply 100% of the time. If the coaches came out and said we don't agree with what our fans did, it kind of puts the spotlight on the fans that you're not representing the majority of that club. You're just representing your own isolated patch and improve your behavior. And you've got terrifying role modeling in particular football with the crowding around of the referee, the disrespect, the theater, questioning every decision like it's life and death, just creating doubt in the fans' minds. So I don't know how to fix that, what the silver bullet is. And in some countries like the Netherlands, like Japan, so the overseas, there's some places that you would say as an overall Australia is better than some there was then, but we really don't want to generate into the violence into some of the final outcomes of the behavior and where it can land. We don't want anything to do with that in our sport. What I've never understood is why isn't the referees environment considered a workplace? I don't get it. Why don't we have referees work for local councils or be engaged? It's like you're hitting a council worker. It's like there's a gap there that people think they, why can't these people be arrested? If they did that sort of abuse at a 14-year-old girl in a public place, they would be a 14-year-old girl or a 14-year-old boy that are referring to in your sport. And that's one big thing we're talking about is people abusing teenagers who are trying to make their way in the refereeing world. And I'm very fragile and just getting a bit of pocket money and loading some leadership and confidence skills and they're getting abused by parents if they did that anywhere else. If they did that at the cinema or they did that in the public square or they did that in the school year when they're picking up their kids, they'd literally be arrested. There's a gap for me why our courts, our ovals, our field, sporting fields are the last place you can literally yell vicious abuse and bring someone to tears. And that needs to be cleaned up. There's a lot of work going to facilities and extra toilets and I get all that. But if what's happening is toxic on the field, then we shouldn't be investing in new facilities because we should be encouraging people to go do other things and or just have absolute zero tolerance and the kids got a suffer from the parents' behavior. We saw an example in the Canary Football League early this year of a referee literally getting their jaw smashed to pieces by a fan. The stakes are high. And if there's a vacuum or there's a gray area, people will just walk in and exploit that. It's human nature. So I'm started quite soft and I've now gone on to zero tolerance really once should the 99% suffer for the 1%. When it can be such a combustible environment of people wanting the best for their kids, they get confirmation bias. Of course they're not going to see the other teams fouls in the same light as they see their own kids getting fouled. It's just human nature. And I remember after that Canary Banks telling me, I funnily enough two weeks later, refereed myself, got called in for the whistle on my son's team and the players all surrounded me and gave me a one minute clap. You know, that's like the longest minute of your life and I would just stare at my trackies and a bit hung over, I had a function that I'd before and I thought, oh, that's amazing. Is this going to happen every week and it just lasted one? We just like referee appreciation around and lasted one week and that's what seems to happen. A lot of initiatives will fly up in response to various crises but every sport is facing such unique conditions to themselves. The only thing you can do is just take bits and pieces of sports that are maybe similar to you in some ways and just trying different things piecemeal until 40 million a year is put into this scourge addressing this problem and a lot of real serious education, awareness, best practice can be just rolled right across more referees, more badge to people at every game. Police at certain games, if that's what it takes, you know, whatever it is to deliver beautiful community sport without it being a scary, inhospitable, uninclusive environment, it has to take top priority. They have to just stop looking at facilities, participation when people could often leave some of these sports with worse problems and they in their mind had coming in if they weren't feeling included or didn't have their Australian identity fully developed yet or they were looking at their first team sport coming out of a closed community. It might be a terrifying experience and it's funny, I remember taking some Chinese students seeing a program in the AFL with Chinese students went to see their first AFL game and just seeing how horrified they were at the abuse of the referees. They weren't marvelling at the skills of the players, they didn't really have an understanding of the skill sets and a chestnut, but the whole time like, where is that person's parents, you know, who's sticking up for them? So some of the cultures find that abuse, that loud, vitriolic abuse to be absolutely inherent and I would suggest that might put a long-term cap on as Australia's demographics change on you might see some changes in who the most attended sports are or some of the ones now the most attended may not be unless they can really combat this environment where you can't yell out something racist, you can't yell out something sexist, but you can yell out some of the most vicious words short of swearing or sometimes including swearing at referees and that's the blind spot. Well, we know there's a groundswell of match officials mobilising with other officials to address the issues head on with their respective sports associations. What needs to happen for match officials for multiple sports to come together and create a collective that can fight this from a national multi-sport perspective? I think that's coming and there's different groups doing a range of different things and there is a summit planned for 2024, but even when you go to market a summit like that, the sports often uninterested or won't pay for it or won't underwrite it because they don't want to be involved in something that they're not gonna get a pass mark for on what they're doing and that pass mark comes from it being under-resourced, having one or two people taken care of it to things aren't improving or if you look at cricket, batsman dissented umpires for dismissals has gone up just staring at the official and muttering away. So in some cases, every other metric may be trending upwards because this little one here that we don't want to talk about because it's the great secret. So having a summit would be good, but I think there needs to be a major governmental inquiry into turn rates, abuse of officials, what can be done, and then it become a major fundable item where all the sports put in their requirements and the referee because the sports aren't going to do it, it's not a priority, it doesn't drive fan engagement. In fact, arguing about the referee does stimulate fan engagement with people talking a lot on social and if only that had been called a forward pass or whatever it is, people lead, you know, sports shows after games leading with the referee mistake rather than any one of 50 player mistakes they could have focused on. So unless you have that whole of sport thing, media will blame the coaches, coaches will blame the sports. The fans will say we can do all we want. We've got free speech, it's an Australian culture and the thing just goes around. But we haven't admitted it to problems. So we need a government level, someone to do a major report like various sports do reports on governance that needs to be a major report done by a reputable body who has experience in the space and canvass all of the issues and put it on the table. It treated equally the same as we treat facilities. Like women's toilets, like LGBTI inclusion, like Aboriginal programs to boost participation. There's all this boosting of participation but no one's protecting this trusted group who is an essential service and needed for the sport. You're focused on basketball in the latest article for the sport at the Crossroads series. In a you interviewed former NBL referee John Chapman, one of his quotes really stuck out for me when talking about sideline abuse where he said, "At the elite level, you treat it as part of the entertainment product. It's part of the show and the occasional thing we might hear from the crowd. It's best to treat it as part of the product. What do you take from that?" I think they are at that level. I think there is some referees who get at the highest level, the best ones get respect same as AFL. No one goes Ray Chamberlain, so if you sit at the very top 5%, you're used as the example that the others need. As the example that the others are falling short of, you're used as the glimpse of greatness. I think at the top level it has to be explained because people are paid often their full time and when they are full time as the expectations on them increase. And I think they have to deal with a Michael Jordan or a Sachin Tendolka. At that elite level, they're dealing with the superstars for some of these people. There's no Dickie Bird in Cricket is widely celebrated. The guys that make it through. So that they are part of the theatre, whether it's a choice or not. And I don't think the ones I spoke to say they can't hear. I don't want to disappoint people. But in basketball, you can't hear half of it because there's not, of course, not like golf where people are quiet during key moments. People are encouraged to be as loud as possible. And you're a long way from the fans there and any player that says a thing to the ref is just a straight tech foul. It's a coach killer. It's highly discouraged behavior. So basketball has the right to include fan abuse as part of in stadium. But the trade-off there is you hear it on social or your family hears it on social or your kids hear it in the playground. That's the trade-off that you are part of the entertainment product. But you will have some terrifyingly bad things said about you on social media by disgruntled fans, people who's bet you impacted. So that's the trade-off there. And I think he said that having also refereed much low. He didn't, he's not saying that goes across all of it. That's just for the elite. For him, it was the over 35, not the under 12s. He was the over 35s basketball, just a bunch of dads going out. Keeping the last of their body alive, often their migrants from other sports playing basketball for the first time. And he said that's the abuse you get from fans and players at that particular level is personal because you can hear it being paid to be abused. My part of a referees elite salary is the fact that you are going to cop some abuse. That's factored in that's why they get paid more. But yeah, it did stay with me. What also stayed with me from John Chapman is that America and our referees are covered by indemnity insurance. It's just a tool of the trade. It's not just your whistle, a nice pair of shirts and a short every referee has to have indemnity insurance. And that's ranging from you didn't ensure the court was wiped properly to the way you allowed people to get away with fouls led to my son losing his tooth all the way down to my son got fouled out in that crucial game and didn't get his college scholarship and you've cost my son the life he dreamed of. That's somewhere we certainly don't want to go is having referees covered by indemnity insurance. But none of this changes until it's made a workplace with its own proper union that's policing this and they are treated the same as any other workplace. They cop more than parking inspectors. People don't just go and rant to parking inspectors now unless someone finds a ticket immediately and like people begrudgingly accept their existence but referees from the outset will cop it. So it needs to be made a workplace and people need to be given to be charged at police level for not think that going down the greenfield some magic place where people can go and do it. They want they need to be have the same rules applied whether it's disturbing the peace, whatever it is. If someone went and did that in the middle of a mall it would be and yes there's not emotional unscripted drama happening in the middle of some malls but it just has to be that way or people are going to get killed. And there's horror stories, particularly South American football where the stakes are so high that one ref got be headed. But that's what happens if it's unchecked and you just got to nip it in the butter earlier not allow it to continue down the spectrum where things just keep getting normalized. You won't have refs, we'll have to umpire ourselves and you think the trouble's bad now. Start refing football yourself and see in a highly competitive environment where you're representing towns and civic pride is on the line. There'll be all in broadly would be a disaster. We shouldn't need referees. We should all be under the on a code where we all refer ourselves like junior tennis. But human nature is that we do need referees. They need to be treated like the golden super fans that they are treated like a high level community leaders and treaters as heroes of the sport just like everyone else is. And then we can build a grounds well of respect that can one day we can close up club respect and say job done. But right now you get your hands full. - Yeah, that'll be an ideal ending to club respect where we're not required anymore. Last question, I'd like to go big here. If you had a few billion dollars, how would you address the issue of match official abuse in Australia? - You would have a glamorization annual campaign, a hero building campaign for referees at all levels. So it's glamorized. It's repositioned as a leadership role and not a resilience role on how much you can take or you've got to have thick skin. Absolute nonsense. Parents have to just stop yelling abuse. They don't yell abuse at the theater or in the arts world in sports. Is an extension of that. We all have to be bound by rules. I would have a massive increase in paying people to mentor junior referees because the pipeline breaks down. Once people have lasted two years in junior referees, they're in a badge polo of the authority and any crowd abuse or coach abuse is managed by that person and not the junior referee. They've got better things to worry about than going and giving warnings to coaches or giving warnings to error to parents. And like most things, most cowards disappear when they're confronted by a badge or accountability. So a watched source but never boils over. And I just think it has to be flush these guys out. Be very hard. I'd like to see referees be counsel employed and to have the veneer. I don't think being employed by an association is a sort of run by the association, but just like any council people, they're treated with respect. We've got to increase the respect or councils are on the polos. There's a second thing, but the councils are involved. I'd like to see a policeman at every single major sporting event. I don't know. It's much better there for the positive PR and for the fact that people don't mark up when their activities can attract a policeman. I think it works on every level of the sitting in a station. Why can't they be down at a ground just walking around on walkie-talkie with six or seven people that are there? Just a part of it. You just carry the walkie-talkie and just come over to field seven. It would end if a police person came around embarrassing for that parent that a police person comes over and says, this is your first warning. If you do it again, this becomes a police matter. You get a $600 fine for disturbing the peace and you've got to go and see, you've got to go to a diversionary program for parent behavior. 'Cause the other parents don't want to be policing this stuff. So police paid referee supports for all sports just based on your level of participation. That should be a bonus of having higher participants and hero building campaigns at state level, state national and local level, which not only shows that these guys are the heroes that I believe they are, but it makes people want to join this. That okay, I wasn't a player. It makes seniors want to join it. It makes 12 year old kids can't wait until they can be a referee. And I think if you do a top down and a bottom up solution, and just if you just assume we're not gonna fix it, but we can certainly control it and we can certainly make examples of the bad eggs, which fires a shot across the bowels from everybody, including coaches getting banned from a year of coaching. You don't have an inalienable right to a coach's ticket based on your tactics and your brilliance. The extra thing you have to bring now in your toolkit is respect for referees. And that means biting down and not blaming the referees for everything because they're easy skate goats, but it's cowardice. And we need to stamp cowardice out in all its forms and that's a mixture of carrot and stick. - I find what you said quite compelling that we need to focus on changing the culture of officiating so that we see it for what it is, a leadership role. - I think it is, they're great leaders. They've stepped up, they're brave. It's a hero's journey. Every time you take a whistle and step on that field, you're as brave as the players in many ways. Players may get injured. The players are not going to get psychologically attacked like referees consistently do. They're the superheroes of sport. And until they're brought up to the same level of respect as everyone else, they will be remained unsung heroes. And I believe you're doing God's work there with club respect as far as constantly shining a light on something that people are very, very uncomfortable with. So just, it's hard, but keep punching. - I appreciate it, Patrick. - I love every time one of your articles comes up. I really appreciate that you've taken your time and to come and have a chat with us. So thanks for joining us on SmartPlace. - My pleasure, thanks for having me. - You've been listening to SmartPlace, proudly brought to you by a club respect, Victorian Women's Trust, and its hard prevention entity, the Doug Dale Trust for Women and Girls. We'd like to thank all of our supporters and donors with special thanks to the Wood Foundation and Spices Australia. Executive producer is Mary Crooks, thanks to the team at Victorian Women's Trust. SmartPlace was edited and mixed by Maria Tahazadeh. I'm your executive producer, host, and club respect manager, Tarak Bayrakwa. This podcast was produced in Melbourne and we respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this land, the wereundry people of the Kulin Nation. For more information about this podcast, including show notes and resources, visit clubrespect.org.au and follow us on social media at Club Respect Team. You can also find out more about the Victorian Women's Trust via their website www.org.au or follow them on social media at Vic Women's Trust. Thank you for listening.