Referees

As you may have heard, the Professional Referee Organization (PRO), the group that provides referees for MLS, NWSL, USL, and MLS Next, recently locked out members of the Professional Soccer Referees Association (PRSA), the union that bargains on behalf of professional officials in North America. I don’t want to alarm Angel City fans here. I reached out to the PRO and PRSA and was assured that “The lockout that has been instituted applies to referees who officiate regularly in Major League Soccer. It won’t impact assignments for the NWSL season,” per Chris Rivett, Manager of Communications at PRO. This is because the lockout is only affecting the Senior Match Officials CBA, which, “As a general rule, these Officials do 99% of their work in MLS,” per PRSA President Peter Manikowski. The NWSL, however, falls under the PRO2 contract, which was signed last April and goes for three more seasons. So there is not imminent concern about a disruption for Angel City games. However I think that these contract negotiations offer a good moment for us to reflect on the importance of referees in the game.

When I was in college, a friend of mine would referee on the weekends, and one time a group of us went to a game to support him. It was actually a lot of fun. Every time he blew the whistle, every card that he brandished, was met with cheers and applause from our group and some looks of confusion and incredulity on the faces of the other fans. But it also made me look at the game from a referee’s perspective, which I hadn’t ever done before. My friend ended up refereeing at the collegiate level for 10 seasons. He had a game, as an Assistant Referee, in which he spotted an egregious off-the-ball misconduct by a player from the home team, alerted the referee, and recommended a red card, which was duly given. As most of the fans, and the coach, probably didn’t even see the misconduct, they were furious, and proceeded to shower my friend and the officiating team with abuse for the rest of the match, escalating to the point that the coach was sent off as well. After that, my friend decided that it just wasn’t worth it. It’s a lot of time off work, long distance travel to games, low pay, and you might get torn apart for making the correct call.

Since 2020, the MLS has added 5 new teams, with San Diego joining next year. The NWSL has added four teams since 2022, with two more on the horizon. Additionally, MLS has had VAR since 2017, while the NWSL added VAR last year, which requires additional officials for every match. The upcoming USLSL shouldn’t directly compete, as they’re on a winter schedule, but it will also require referees. More teams means more matches, which means more referees. The fact is that we need a deeper talent pool of officials than ever before, but if we want the ones working their way up to stick with it, they need some incentive, and they need to see it as a career, not a side hustle. PRSA President Manikowski also says, “In the future certainly more Officials will be needed because the number of professional matches occurring each weekend is rapidly increasing.  What increases in pay does is probably two-fold. First, it attracts more people and second, probably more importantly, it incentivizes Officials to give more time/availability.” This latter part really speaks to the experience of being a referee. A lot of them have other jobs too, and they often have to take time off in order to go to a game. People have to be paid more than they would lose from taking that time off. The travel also cannot be underestimated. According to the PRSA, many MLS referees spend between 200 and 240 nights away from home each year.

Going back to the CBA currently being negotiated, the PRSA vote against ratification was 95.8%, with 97.8% of eligible members voting. That’s a really staggering majority. They clearly feel like they aren’t getting the necessary incentives. Frankly, we’re not going to see fans provide a more welcoming environment for officials any time soon, so I think that getting them paid is the best way to make it worth their while. Actually, if it were up to me, I’d make sure that they had great travel accommodations and a health plan that covered weekly therapy sessions too. Really, investing in officials seems like one of the easiest steps to take, and one I’ve been advocating for, even before this lockout. If we want to see fewer star players injured by reckless play, we need top officials. If we want foreign players and managers to consider American leagues as a viable destination, then they need to see the right calls consistently being made. Quality officiating is a prerequisite of quality soccer, and really lays the foundation for everything else. Bad officiating, on the other hand, can undo everything that the league is trying to accomplish. The PRO states that they are hiring “qualified non-bargaining unit officials so that the games can go ahead as scheduled,” but I’m personally a little skeptical that officials that haven’t routinely been handling MLS matches, and are fine working for less money, are going to be as good as the PRSA officials. How much experience do they have with VAR? Have they dealt with the dynamics of having a star player like Messi on the pitch? I also think that we shouldn’t just view this as an MLS issue, as even this CBA will have a downstream impact on the NWSL and USL. A better Senior Match Officials contract will encourage more people to want to reach that level (again, career, not side hustle), which should lead to an increase of referees in the PRO2 pool. I’d also eventually like to see the NWSL move up to that Senior Match Official level, but of course, that is going to require enough people with the necessary qualifications to cover all MLS and NWSL matches. Having a better contract will help us reach those numbers.

And I think that deep down, we all know that soccer needs referees. We’ve all seen a game at some level ruined by a bad call, and nobody wants that. But I don’t think that most fans ever stop to think about where referees come from, or what their life is like off the pitch. We just assume that they’ll be there, and that they’ll make the right call every time. But it takes time, training, and experience to get to the highest level. We have to remember that these are people, and I think that if we see more investment in them, starting with an acceptable contract in this CBA, we’ll see higher quality soccer across the country.