Soccer needs to change its refereeing. We need to get things better, and last night’s USA-Germany game has a great example. The referee called a foul against Germany and then awarded a Penalty Kick. Penalty Kicks are game critical decisions that we, as referees, have to get right. The referee got it wrong. She got the foul but missed the location as the foul actually happened out of the box but the US player landed in the box post-foul.
So what happened?
Let’s look at a couple of different things.
First the attack is coming down the offensive left hand side and the attacker is angling into the middle of the field. The referee has decent proximity to play, but she is running within the center arc lane. This is sub-optimal positioning as the attack is funneling to the middle of the field, the supporting attackers are jamming the middle of the field, the defenders are converging on the attack. The middle is more congested than Manhatten rush hour traffic. Better positioning would have been to get wider and be on the outside shoulder of the attacker instead of the inside shoulder.
Her assistant referee’s job is to give the center good information on game critical decisions. Usually that just means judging offside. In every pre-game I’ve ever had with referees who some day dream of working international tournaments, I’ve been told that if there is a foul on the edge of the box, give the center referee any relevant 100% sure information. Usually this means did I think the foul started in or out of the box?
I don’t think the assistant referee (who would be running on the bottom of the screen sideline) had the position to give good information.
You can see the German center back is dropping hard. She is the second to last defender and thus is the offside line. She is four, maybe five yards deeper than the spot of the foul. The assistant referee’s focus on a strong attack at the edge of the box is offside. There is one American player (slightly more central) who is behind the main German line but ahead of the German center back, she is a potential offside problem in 2 touches. The AR is tracking the German offside line with all of her focus. She can’t help without abandoning her primary responsibilities.
The center referee has two other sources of help. The other assistant referee is off screen and 30 to 40 yards behind play and sixty yards off the foul. Her responsibility during an aggressive attack is to watch behind the referee’s back for stupid retaliation and to scan the field as she knows the center referee and the lead AR are narrowing their focus on the run of play. The last source of potential help is the 4th official. She is the back-up center official and the administrative coordinator. Her position is on the AR-1/Bench side at roughly midfield, so she is seventy yards off the foul. She might have been scanning the field or watching the play, but more likely she is trying to keep an eye on the benches. The odds of her being able to give good help is low.
So the referee saw the foul, did not pay attention to the fact that the German defender who fouled the attacker had both feet clearly outside of the box at the moment of contact and followed the flight of the body into the box instead of seeing where the foul did occurred. I understand that, I’ve fucked up penalty kicks doing exactly that before. And my assessor and crew got on my case afterwards.
How do we fix it? Better positioning for the center referee would help, but I don’t think it solves the problem as I’ve had the pleasure of running lines for American female FIFA referees, and the slowest one is a gazelle, so this was a position of choice not a position due to conditioning. I think the referee was anticipating the run of the attack and was slightly surprised by the foul and assumed it had to be in the box, not just outside of the box. The rest of her crew had responsibilities and vantage points that made rapid assistance unlikely, and she made a bad decision and stuck with it.
Systemically at the highest levels of the game, some type of replay challenge system could be useful on truly game critical decisions. Goals, penalty kicks, orange card situations where yellow or red card decisions are both justifiable could be reviewable if there is a natural stoppage in play. In this scenario, play had clearly stopped so gathering new information including information from the booth on location of the foul could have occurred if that was allowed. I will never work games that will have replay, I’m a small fish, but for professional and international matches, dead ball replay challenges could be a possibility especially if the coach who initiates the challenge is cautioned for a failed challenged, that would impose a reasonable price on a challenge. We, as referees need to get game critical calls right at all levels of play, especially at levels of play that are on international television networks.
HinTN
Great analysis, as always.
Kylroy
Do you think the international community would ever accept something so disgustingly *American* as reviewing tape to ensure correct officiating? If the Hand of God goal didn’t spur people to look at the replay, I can’t see what would.
Richard Mayhew
@Kylroy: UEFA has the 5 man referee crew to review goal line decisions, and there is constant talk about goal line technology. I can see the major payers of soccer wanting to get the calls right, and that means the big European professional leagues, with FIFA following.
I am not sure how the system would work, but a limited review at natural stoppages on game critical acts of commission decisions would probably work for the major professional leagues. I don’t know about FIFA sanctioned tournaments.
oldster
I saw that Hope Solo today said that she had did “the stall tactic” in confronting a German penalty kick. This tactic, said some, should have resulted in a yellow card against her. Instead, she was not given a penalty, and the German kicker kicked wide.
What did all of that mean? What is “the stall tactic,” why would it cause the opposing kicker to kick wide, why should it have earned Solo a penalty?
All explanations welcome!
KG
I’m slowly turning away from video review in sports. It tends to slow the game down and seems to rarely impact the game. On top of that, how many memorable moments have been because of a “missed call”? The hand of God, the fifth down, Jordan’s offensive foul against the Jazz. In all honesty, I don’t mind occasional missed calls because they tend to be random.
And of course, as almost every coach I ever had said: don’t let the game be so close that the ref can decide the outcome
BetterYeti
Another thank you. Any thoughts on the red card no-call on the Julie Johnston penalty? Is the amount of contact a factor in this situation? When the keeper was sent off in the Columbia game, the contact was more egregious, but both were denials of an obvious scoring opportunity. I didn’t think the extent of contact had a role in that rule.
Punchy
I’m sick and tired of referee discussions. They do the best they can, and becuase FIFA’s a fucking idiot, wont allow for replay.
There’s bad calls in baseball, horrendously homer-ish calls in basketball (charging ever called against the home team?), and very subjective calls in hockey. It’s part of the game, so deal with it.
Kylroy
@Richard Mayhew: Okay, so there’s a possibility. I just think “we’re going to stop play for two minutes while the refs look at tape” is such a departure from the usual flow of soccer matches that I can already hear the purists screaming. Given all the growing pains various America-centric sports have had with instant replay (like the NFL’s first implementation letting refs review at will causing games to constantly bog down), I don’t know that fans used to nearly uninterrupted play will have patience with a system that will probably take a few iterations to get right.
SP
I thought the refereeing was weak overall- this call, orange Johnston in favor of US, but also letting some calls go against Germany that I thought should have been cards- someone took out Rapinoe’s knee from behind, Popp put an elbow in the back of someone’s head on a 50/50 ball without any attempt on the ball which would have been her second yellow.
peach flavored shampoo
@oldster: I believe the “stall tactic” is when 4 or 5 women all decide to all go to a public restroom together as a group.
R. Johnston
The rules are as much to blame here as the officiating. The difference between a free kick and a penalty kick is huge, and shouldn’t turn on an essentially meaningless half-step difference in positioning. In the effort to create an objective rule that eliminates referee discretion (foul in the box is a penalty kick, foul out of the box is a free kick), an arbitrary and unfair rule that does nothing to eliminate referee error is in place.
Even if replay were allowed, that half-step is still meaningless and the rule is still arbitrary and unfair. Penalty kicks are huge game-changing penalties and simply shouldn’t be handed out for fouls in what are marginal scoring opportunities.
butler
@oldster: Basically she walked out of her goal, got some water, wandered around, and took her sweet time before going back to face the PK. Not allowed under the rules, and probably card worthy. Not an uncommon tactic either, trying to ice the kicker before a PK.
butler
@Punchy: Baseball now has replay to try and eliminate bad calls.
Awarding a PK is like giving a team a free throw worth 40 points. It makes sense to try and get that right.
Sherparick
@KG: Of course when the best teams play each other, and both play at or near their peak, it should be a close game by definition. For the most part I have liked replay in baseball and football, some clearly bogus calls have been reversed (of course if it had been in effect in 1985, the St. Louis Cardinals and not the Kansas City Royals would have won the World Series, and that would have made my Cardinal fans relatives unbearably smug and I would missed my schadenfreude over the last 30 years of hearing them bitch about the one that got away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Denkinger (Whenever I read about this, and how the Cardinals completely lost their composure, from Whitey Herzog to the bat boy, instead of concentrating on like, playing baseball, I chuckle. Yes, the joys of a Cubs’ fan are few and more than a century separates us from our last championship, while the Cardinals have a 11 of them (second to the Yankees), that is one of them).
Richard Mayhew
@BetterYeti:
You are right, the amount of contact is minimally relevant to the decision on a Denying an Obvious Goal Scoring Opportunity (DOGSO) red card, but there are a couple of criteria that defines “Obvious Goal Scoring Opportunity” where things could come into fuzziness.
The strongest argument for a yellow is the German player was already in the act of shooting when fouled, but that is a weak sauce argument for yellow. I hope that in the same situation on a game that I’m doing, that I go red.
shawn
idk how you managed to write a post MORE confusing than health insurance but to me you did :)
katdip
I agree with the analysis on replays, but don’t fault the center official. I’ve been a ref at the competitive high school level (Northern Virginia), so can sympathize with both the positioning and the call. I think it would have been hard to get that much further outside the play giving pace of play and the need to cover the possibility the play goes further out the wing. As to the placement, watching it real time it is hard to see exactly where the feet were on impact. As a referee you are running full tilt, watching the players running full tilt and have to decide very quickly. It becomes more apparent in slow-mo, but it also was foul that cut off a potential goal scoring opportunity. Not that that is an excuse to get it wrong, but still….
Eric U.
I think replay is a horrible idea for soccer. I supported it in football, but we still see really bad decisions there so my support is wavering. I support it in baseball, since there’s no action anyway.
ribber
@oldster:
I’m by no means an official of anything in soccer except long-ago high school, pick-up games and coaching my kids, but the stalling seemed obvious to me when she was walking around, drinking water, and not standing as required on the goal line. The stalling was basically like the equivalent in football of “icing the kicker” giving them time to get nerved up and over-think it. What she did wasn’t all that egregious, but 30 seconds more and I’d bet she’d get a yellow for it when it becomes obvious that it is a stall tactic and not just ordinary preparation for a kick.
Richard Mayhew
@SP: The women’s game at the international level has weaker refereeing because the women referees have fewer top tier games at home to work on. The top female professional leagues are effectively semi-pro, and there are far fewer random exhibitions and professional minor-league games to build the game count of top tier games. I know in the US there are a couple of female assistant referees in the MLS who are there to build up their tough game experience for future FIFA tournaments. (They passed the male fitness requirements but need the experience)
katdip
@katdip: The more I look at it, the more I sympathize with the call. You can watch the feet, but it looks to me that the actual contact comes AFTER Morgan leaves her feet to avoid the player coming into her space. Contact with the hip seems to be right on the line or in the box.
Richard Mayhew
@katdip: I agree, I understand how the referee made the call and what she thought she was seeing as she indicated PK. I’ve blown that call at multiple levels from U-12 to D-2 NCAA multiple times. And each time I’ve blown it, I tried to figure out what was actually happening versus what I thought I was seeing and how I can narrow the gap between the two.
As for positioning, I am just not a big fan of a center whose shoulders are facing the AR, I agree, she has to cover the possibility of the play going wider, but once the attackers hips go inwards, the next few touches are either going straight to the end line or they are entering the center of the field. She has proximity, at the time of the whistle, she is probably 6 to 8 strides from the spot, but the angle and the traffic is tough to work through coming from inside to out instead of outside to in.
phein55
Any way you can stop the GIF at the moment of contact? I’m not so sure that the defenders’ feet were both outside the box. What if her right foot is in the air over the box?
Also, is the “moment of contact” only at the first perceptible instance of contact? Are there not cases where a little bit of contact is not a foul, but an entire 1/4 to 1/2 second sequence is a foul?
Paul in KY
@KG: Yeah, England sure looks back fondly on that Hand of God goal, ditto The Tigers. Good times they were…
Jeffro
@butler: ‘free throw worth 40 points’ – great point.
Maybe PKs should be worth .5 of a point? Overcome-able by a ‘real’ goal, yet enough to win a tied game?
Paul in KY
@BetterYeti: Julie should have been given a red card, IMO.
Bitter Scribe
I’ve never understood why soccer uses only one on-field official. Basketball has three of them to cover a playing area one-fifth as large.
ed_finnerty
@ribber:
Canada lost a shot at the gold medal in london because their goalie was called for much less egregious stalling
Rommie
It seems a dicey situation to allow review of judgement calls, as it puts a lot of pressure on a field ref or booth ref that already have it in quantity. It’ll catch the blatant dives, but there’s no guarantee it reverses the German foul (Obvious being in the eye of the observer) and it’s rolling dice on the US foul. It doesn’t help with the I Saw a Foul, your Goal Doesn’t Count calls.
It’s in the same area as the NFL officials with holding or pass interference calls. How do you “review” them outside of the few cases of blatant error? Yeah, it’s great to reverse the egregious mistakes, but most of the calls don’t fall into that category.
I’m all for getting calls right, but I can’t see how you do this without adding as much controversy as you are trying to remove.
Bobby B.
“TWAT! That was liquid football!”
“Shit! DId you see that!?”
“He must have a foot like a traction engine!”
ThresherK (GPad)
Is the letter of the law for a PK about where the defender’s feet are at the start of the foul?
I have just nearly got my head wrapped around the newest offsides rule.
Amir Khalid
@Bitter Scribe:
Football has not one but three officials on the pitch: the referee and two assistants, one on each touchline. As Richard has been explaining.
Richard Mayhew
@Rommie: I think the standard of review is indisputable visual evidence (trust me, that PK call will be at half the clinics I go to from July 15 to March 15, 2016 and FIFA will have a position on the call), and where the area of dispute is the location of the foul not whether or not the foul occurred. Referee judgment is still on the foul call, but errors of fact (location) can be reviewed.
SP
Who cares if Solo had gotten a yellow? It’s very rare for goalies to get yellows in the run of play, so unlikely it would have affected her in the rest of the game, and if she got a second yellow next game so what, she has to sit out the game after the final?
Bitter Scribe
@Amir Khalid: That’s my point. The other two officials are on the touchline (i.e., not on the field). And unless I’m mistaken, they’re not empowered to call fouls, just out-of-bounds and offsides.
Richard Mayhew
@Amir Khalid: But I understand his point, the player to official ratio in soccer is 7:1 for most games,and 9:2 when there is a 4th official while the field of play is massive. The center official who has ultimate decision making authority is trying to cover 8200 square meters by sight, and 4,000 square meters as primary responsibility.
For people used to American sports, both the ratio of officials to players is absurdly low and then the amount of field needed to be covered is absurdly high.
A lot of it is cultural, the referee in soccer is expected to be a diety where if s/he did not see it, it did not happen and the players are expected to know that and accept it, and economics. Finally, it would be an ugly transition to a three or five man system where there are multiple whistles. In 5 years, it could work out nicely but the first couple of years the game flow will be destroyed as referees and ARs who are used to the three man, one whistle system learn to deal with multiple whistles and decision makers.
ribber
@ed_finnerty: Sure, but it’s a judgment call. I’m not defending a call on Canada I don’t remember too well.
Richard Mayhew
@ThresherK (GPad): The law is the foul must occur in the box… and just reading how the bodies moved, the foul in this case happened either at the German defender’s feet or upfield of the German defender’s feet, therefore the foul did not happen in the box.
Richard Mayhew
@ed_finnerty: A little bit of context, that call was technically correct, but ticky tacky as hell. the referee had been trying to get faster distributions out of the keeper for a while and had been escalating the non-penal steps to do so for at least 15 minutes, and then finally the referee lost patience. Technically it was a correct decision, but if one looks at international assignments, the referee is not getting anything good from FIFA after the Olympic Finals.
different-church-lady
@Bitter Scribe:
Yes and look how well basketball is officiated! Uh, wait…
Steve in the ATL
Can we get back to talk about how hot the German players were?
KG
@Paul in KY: the fans of the team that loses, no matter how they lost, never look back fondly on the outcome. A one point loss with no questionable calls sucks as much as a one point loss with a questionable call sucks as much as getting blown out.
Bitter Scribe
@Richard Mayhew: Yeah, I kind of suspected that. Thanks for the explanation. Change is never easy.
Paul in KY
@KG: Yeah, but if the situations had been correctly judged, Argentina would have been consoled by fact that Maradona did an obvious hand ball & Colorado fans by the fact that rules were followed & they only got the standard 4 downs.
Major-league ref fuckups gave us those fondly remembered outcomes.
burnspbesq
I dunno, it looks to me like the hip-to-hip contact starts maybe a couple of inches, at best, outside the line and continues well into the box. The bigger issue I have with the call is that Morgan appears to have initiated the contact by going airborne. She realized that she was running into a cul-de-sac with no passing angles and made the most of a bad situation by selling the call.
JustRuss
I get Mayhew’s point, but can’t get too worked up about it. Replay would kill soccer’s flow, so best-effort is all you can hope for, and that play was in “close enough” category. Football is a game of inches because the format–pause after every play–easily lends itself to replays, and even then some games get ridiculously drawn out thanks to reviews.
I can maybe see allowing review for fouls that result in a penalty kick, but once you open that door there’s a danger of things getting out of hand.
richard mayhew
@burnspbesq: Hip to hip contact when the ball is clearly outside of playing distance is an illegal charge (when ball is within playing distance, it is a bit gray as some contact is expected esp. with women, but it is foul if the hips are unloaded into the opponent to create space).
I have no problem with Morgan going airborne as she was clearly fouled, as the German defender cut across her path to the ball and while making no attempt to play the ball swung her hips to knock Morgan off of her path. If the German defender was turning to recover to the ball, Morgan stays on her feet and is half a step of the defender and on her inside shoulder. Smart, tactical foul in a man or ball may pass, not both situation, just the ref blew the location of the foul from what should have been a 20% chance of goal direct free kick and highly probable yellow card to a 75% chance of goal penalty kick.
smintheus
The call was close enough. It’s not remotely as big a deal as the many badly blown calls and non-calls in this World Cup – which among other things handed Germany a victory over France.
richard mayhew
@JustRuss: Once a game per team with the challenging coach getting a yellow card for a non-overturned call would minimally interrupt flow. The challenges would be limited to goal/no goal decisions, in/out of box decisions and maybe a couple more things that are obvious game critical calls. No challenges on referee judgement calls (is that a foul, not a foul etc) but on clear matters of fact.
Lee
My wife noticed this during the replays: There is a player between the ref and foul. The ref probably didn’t have a clear view of where exactly the contact started/ended.
@Richard Mayhew: I’ve always wondered what happened to refs that make controversial calls like that. Kinda sucks for her.
Patrick
For every penalty called that was actually a few inches outside the box, there are dozens that are not called at all. In the first half, Morgan was bear hugged on a cross into the box. Should have been a penalty. The problem with replay in soccer is that there is time after a penalty is called to review, but the non-calls have no natural pause. Many don’t even get a replay because game action doesn’t allow it until much later.
Maybe teams could challenge calls to a replay official and then if awarded, the penalties could come at the end of each half if the score is within one.
Beyond whether it was a penalty it was certainly a foul. And, lets not forget that it is incredibly cynical foul to purposely take out the attacker just outside the box because you are beaten. It is strange that so much ink is spilled trying to argue that a move that is not in the spirit of the rules is not a PK but a FK because of a few inches or the position of the defender’s feet. The defender was beaten, was not sure she had any coverage, and takes out the player. Funny that so many are arguing it is a good play unjustly punished!
William
Obvious superiority of rugby laws once more
Bill Murray
I think the AR should have been able to help on the positioning of the German player. I don’t know if the center even asked, it looked to me like she pointed to the spot immediately after the foul.
@richard mayhew:
So, no actually penalty for the requesting team being wrong. Also, “matters of fact” are often very difficult to determine even in replay, unless one has hundreds of cameras. I remember a World Cup with Norway and a US center (Essie Baharmas?) who called a penalty and every TV angle made it look like very bad call. A day or two later, one photographer had one picture showing the shirt pull that really only the center had seen. Of course that wouldn’t be reviewable under your system, but does show the problem with all review systems. Video reviews are, to me, the TSA shoe check of sports. They give the illusion of great utility but often have little utility in practice.
MCA1
Why do you need the box at all? Inside or outside is a semi-arbitrary test whose binary results yield massively different impacts. Can’t we just give a direct free kick from wherever the foul occurred, and then just eliminate the defender wall (or give the ref discretion over whether there can be a wall)?
Totally agree with the point about it being insane that there’s only one ref plus two assistants for a field of play that’s close to two acres. I get the point about one whistle and wanting a consistent “voice” and all that, but if we consider it a good thing to not have officials become an overly conspicuous part of the game, then we should strive to have a system where they can’t individually set the tone of the game. And it’s clear that in soccer games, way too often the personality of the referee is on display, more so than anywhere other than the home plate ump in baseball. That would seem to be diminished with a team of refs instead of one “voice of God.”
Yes, it would be a transition, but there’s good precedent in the recent past to suggest that transition wouldn’t be nearly as painful as one might think. The NHL heard the same concerns about adjusting to a new system, and they ended up being mostly unfounded. And officiating there is unquestionably better now with two lead refs instead of one, to go with the two linesmen (who are more empowered than soccer linesmen). There are very, very few issues with the ref at one end of the ice calling the game differently than his companion.
The counterargument about players having developed styles of play over time to fit the basic fact that the ref can’t possibly see everything is, IMHO, a terrible argument. If you want the rules enforced, find a way to enforce them.
katdip
I actually liked using a 2 ref system (still did this for girls HS soccer in the late 80s), so you could see several angles. Gave the occasional opportunities to confer when needed, and could cover at least 2 angles. I could also see adding more ARs on the sidelines – it seems ridiculous that a single AR per side has to look all the way across the field and/or all the way down the line, and watch both for offsides and call the lines. I could easily see having an AR on each side on each half (4 total) – depending on the play the near focuses on fouls and touch line violations, and the far on offsides. For play in the middle their first responsibility is offsides. And their role could be advisory as it is now, with the center being able to accept the call or not.
Kylroy
@JustRuss: (Gridiron) Football also has the incredibly handy penalty of wagering a timeout to have a call reviewed. This reduces the number of reviews drastically, and penalizes invalid challenges in a way that limits a team’s options without formally setting them back in the game. Few games have the possibility to, well, *game* replay review so well.
Pete Gaughan
I have so much opinion on all of this but I’ll limit myself to contributing this one bit: Europe will never go for rules changes that routinely push big sporting events over two hours (which would happen to soccer if video review plus things like real concussion protocol ever took hold). Look at Formula One with a time limit for crying out loud! Admittedly, TV sports over there are less important than in the US; but even for what they do watch (soccer, basketball, handball, what have you) it seems they are not willing to sit for three hours the way Americans have become accustomed.
Eric
@butler: @butler: exactly, when people talk about how much soccer players flop my response is imagine if a foul in the paint meant two free throws worth 40 points each, how much flopping do you think Basketball players would do?
Bitter Scribe
@Pete Gaughan: even for what they do watch (soccer, basketball, handball, what have you) it seems they are not willing to sit for three hours the way Americans have become accustomed.
Except we don’t sit for three hours, since a good one-third of that is timeouts and TV commercials. We spend it getting another beer, going to the bathroom, etc.
That’s what I like about the forward-running clock in soccer, which many Americans find off-putting. You don’t get the constant delays you see in other sports.
Desmond
Rather than debating instant replay, why don’t they just move the penalty kick marker back a few yards so the goalie has a better chance to save it? In a game as low scoring as soccer, it doesn’t make sense to have the game decided on what is essentially a judgement call.