Aliceag wrote:Instead of Spamming the match forums I will open and close this discussion here. I will never post about refereeing again in matchday forums, but I want to understand if I am the crazy one around here before I retire from this inglorious fight (since it seems FIFA refused the request by Brazilian league to have video-refereeing).
Questions to everyone based on what you see, your personal experience watching european football.
1) Do you perceive the refereeing being good in general? Do referees make good decisions most of the time?
2) When they make bad decisions do you perceive them as being evenly distributed and random? Or do you believe they favour richer and bigger clubs?
3) Do you believe everything should stay the same or do you find there is room for improvement? What would you do? (Video refereeing anyone?).
My goal with this is simply to understand what is the general perception of the forum users around all europe, with everyone bias, since most of us only watch the games our teams are involved.
1. I think refereeing is overall good, but I understand, why others might think differently. I think that some people think it is crap, can be explained the same way, why some people think horoscopes are telling the future. If you read a horoscope and it doesn't come true, you just forget it. It was just some text you read a while ago. Nothing important. But if it comes true, there is a big "Wow, the horoscope predicted that!" moment. Suddenly horoscopes are not superstitious hogwash anymore. I think the same way it is with refereeing. When the referee is not making mistakes, you don't really remember all the right decisions. He was just doing his job and there is nothing to complain and think and talk about later. But if he makes a mistake, especially a mistake which caused your team to lose, that will be big in your mind. You will remember it. And if it happens again in a later game, it gets added to the previous wrong decision. And after a while you can recall countless bad decisions, while all the right decisions, which were made in the same time, are forgotten and ignored.
2. I think clear wrong game deciding decisions are probably quite equally distributed, but you just remember it again more, if an underdog suffers because of it. If the favourite suffers under it and it is not your own team, it is just not so much of a moment to get angry about and remember that incident. I think though, when it comes to decisions with a certain amount of leeway, where even after seeing replays people will have different opinions about what the right decision would have been, referees might here and there slightly favour the bigger names, especially, when they play at home. I think they might get impressed by the atmosphere or subconsciously influenced by the big interest the game gets in the public and he himself, if he makes a wrong decision against the big team. I think referees sometimes act after the motto, when in doubt, don't whistle against the big team, while the same motto might not be as strong in the case of a small team.
3. I am not a fan of constant video refereeing. For once I think in a lot of instances it is quite useless. It happens quite often that even after replays the situation is far from clear and people will judge what they see totally different. And then it will take some time. So at most I would be ok with each trainer being able to contest two decisions per game. Not more. So for example in case a wrong decision caused your opponents to make a goal or a player from you got to send off, you can contest. Something dramatically wrong doesn't usually happen to a team more than two times a game either way. With smaller wrong decisions a team has to live with.
