Referee Extremism: the situation in Spain and in England 

Real Madrid as you may know, have their own TV station, and for some time there have been complaints that the club has been manipulating the behaviour of referees in their games by focussing strongly on the referees in TV programmes before each match.

This issue has been running for a long time, but now Sevilla have stepped beyond the position of clubs grumbling but doing nothing and according to ESPN, “have filed a complaint with the RFEF accusing Real Madrid TV of a “campaign of persecution and harassment” against the officials ahead of their next match.

The statement says,“We wish to formally report these events to the RFEF to see if their actions can be considered as a violation of competition rules or any other regulations.

“The club also wishes to reiterate its strongest condemnation of these orchestrated campaigns aimed at undermining the image of the refereeing body, causing serious harm to Spanish football and calling into question the integrity of the competition.”

Now this is not the first time this issue has been raised as Barcelona’s president has called the approach of Real Madrid TV “shameful” and claimed that the programmes put out by the station do in fact influence referees each week in Real Madrid’s favour.

And it is not just the other clubs that have had enough.   The head of Spain’s equivalent of the notorious PGMO has also said that Real Madrid TV is indeed “putting pressure” on referees through its extremely negative approach.

Indeed the statement notes that Real Madrid are out on their own in this regard, stating that no other club in any other league behaves in the way that Real Madrid’s TV station does.  They add, “There’s no sport, no team in the world that does this. Teams have their [local] press which supports them, but what’s happening with this TV channel has never happened, anywhere else.

“What they’re doing seems absolutely negative to me. I’ve never seen it in 40 years of refereeing, putting pressure on before a game, every week. It’s negative not just for refereeing but for the image of Spanish football… We’ve put it in the hands of legal advice, to look at the matter.”

However, unsurprisingly Real Madrid are not backing down gracefully, probably because they have never ever had to do such a thing ever before.  Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez instead called for Spain’s Government to intervene suggesting the government needed to “take steps to improve refereeing bodies in this country” in order to protect the well-being of Spanish football.

It is interesting to compare this situation with the extreme opposite that we have in England in which no TV station, no radio station and no national newspaper will criticise referees for anything other than the occasional slip.   

And indeed even that occasional slip is rarely taken up, as we might remember with the notorious goal scored against Arsenal by Newcastle after the ball had gone out of play last November.

Quite why these two extreme positions have taken hold in football is hard to fathom.  Real Madrid have got away with their constant sniping at referees in Spain, while PGMO have been allowed to get away with their policy of utter secrecy; both extremist approaches seem obviously unhelpful to me.  

What is needed is something in the middle.  Not a TV station claiming that one side is being hindered unduly by referee incompetence, nor the abject silence that we have in England as a result of the PGMO “no interviews, no comments” policy.

A little independent balance would be welcome, and the biggest question of all is why have both Spain and England allowed such extremist positions to be taken up.