The Soccer Referee

Now, imagine a team of harsh, hard-working brits, each with a wife and 4 kids to feed at home, relaxing on a Saturday afternoon in England on a soccer match.
All the tensions and frustrations that gathered up during the week would spill out at the slightest touch and all that was needed for a full-fledged fistfight to break out between the two teams was a harder tackle or a disputable goal.

The soccer referee was "invented" to keep things in order and look out to the official rules for soccer and although it's admittedly not the best method to do this, referees are still used for this purpose today.

Strangely enough, during the entire history of soccer referees, their evolution was extremely small in comparison to other aspects of the game, such as the gaming rules, tactical and technical aspects of the players and even the soccer ball, which went through different phases of evolution. The "man in black" at the center of the pitch seen today is almost a copy of the same guy at the center of an 1890 match.

The main role of a soccer referee is to make sure that the players respect the official rules for soccer and to punish a breaking of such a rule. A player breaking a rule, for example committing a foul, can be punished by the referee by him whistling a direct or indirect kick for the other team and additionally showing the "outlaw" a yellow or red card.

The latter would mean that the player at thereceiving end of the red card is sent off and must immediately leave the pitch and the same thing happens if he cumulates 2 yellow cards in the same match (after being shown the second yellow card, the player will automatically receive a red card).

Although we usually say that a decision was taken by "the referee" and use the singular for the term, there's actually a team of four refs on the pitch.The central referee is the one doing most of the running and decision making, but he is helped from each sideline by an assistant referee. The assistants's main job is to signal offsides but they can also intervene when an offence takes place near their side of the field.

It's often the case that an assistant referee signals a foul close to the side-line, that the central referee did not notice, being further away from the spot. The fourth ref, or fourth official handles mostly organization issues, such as making sure the substitutes warm up in the designated warm-up area or that the coaches don't step over their bench line area and so forth.

In addition, the fourth ref will also handle extra time and substitutions and he can even substitute the central referee or one of the assistants in case they cannot continue the game.

Since soccer referees are only human, they  are prone to make mistakes. To some extent this provides a certain unpredictability and excitement to the game, but a simple mistake from the referee can often cause a team to lose important objectives.

In numerous occasions, a team lost an important match because of a bad ref call, which further caused them to be knocked out of a competition, loses a cup or a league. Obviously, with such a stake at hand, the pressure on the referee is always extremely high.

Here are some funny soccer referees moments…

Besides having a keen eye, a soccer referee must also have good stamina and good athletic capabilities, more so for the center referee than to his sideline assistants (although they'll do a fair amount of running back and forth the sideline as well).

In order to have the best view on each moment in the game, a referee needs to be as close as possible to the players controlling the ball, so he will run almost as much as one of the players on the pitch.

Other important abilities that the soccer referee must posses include a high sense of impartiality, the ability to sustain pressure (from the players, the crowd, the coaches, etc), the ability to impose their point of view to the players and demand their respect and the ability to speak an international language fluently.