Football has historically been officiated differently in England compared to continental Europe, with economic incentives playing an important role in propagating the differences. Calling fewer fouls and allowing for more physical play has helped the English Premier League maintain its status as the world’s most popular club competition, but the gradual harmonisation of officiating is undermining this commercial advantage.
As a child growing up in the UK playing football all day with my friends, I received a veritable English footballing education. I never really realised what that meant until I moved to the US for my postgraduate studies and started playing with young men from all over the world. I instantly noticed the lower bar that Latin Americans and southern Europeans set for what constitutes a foul. Moreover, I had a much higher willingness to yell “play on” whenever a marginal foul could be plausibly ignored.
Not coincidentally, I was slightly faster and more physical in my play than my peers who grew up in a non-English football culture, and technically way below them. Having grown up in an environment that rewarded speed and aggression, my skills developed accordingly. To me, spending time in the gym building upper-body strength was more useful than practising juggling the ball. This culture filtered all the way up to the highest echelons of the Premier League, where homegrown English stars were powerhouses like Alan Shearer and Paul Ince, compared to the technical wizardry of continental players like Xavi Hernandez or Andrea Pirlo.
The difference at all levels was embodied in the existence of the English football maxim “when in doubt, kick it out” and the absence of a Spanish or Italian analogue. The emphasis on the speed and fluidity of the game made an important contribution to English football’s popularity around the world. Having about 25 per cent fewer stoppages for fouls than competing leagues in Spain and Italy is one of the factors that helps the Premier League earn almost $4 billion annually from domestic and international TV rights. This gives England’s authorities a strong incentive to maintain the country’s idiosyncratic refereeing style as it functions as a source of its commercial edge.
Like all supranational authorities, football’s governing body, Fifa, strives to standardise the game, which includes officiating. However, it has historically tolerated England’s desire to maintain a unique refereeing philosophy due to the country’s status as the home of football. However, sustaining this microculture is becoming harder due to the advent of video-assisted refereeing, or VAR.
Replaying controversial plays in slow motion creates a bias towards calling infringements whenever physical contact occurs, and it encourages the external officials to stick to the homogeneous written rules rather than the unwritten customs of English football in accordance with their formal responsibilities. Moreover, since VAR checks often occur once the game has already been stopped, referees do not feel as though they are interrupting the flow of the game by calling a foul retrospectively.
The fear for football authorities is that over time, this convergence to Fifa’s default rulebook could erode the Premier League’s competitive advantage. This has already happened independently of any conscious change in refereeing culture due to the large influx of foreign players and coaches into England over the past 30 years.
During the mid-1990s and prior to the “Bosman ruling” – which allowed for the free movement of football players within the EU – English clubs were restricted to three non-British players, ensuring that local footballing philosophy ruled the roost. However, last year, only about a third of the total number of registered players in the Premier League were English, with Englishmen constituting a meagre 15 per cent of managers.
The result is an organic evolution in footballing mentality, as children who were used to growing up watching players in the traditional mould, like Tony Adams, are replaced by ones seeing modern technical aesthetes like John Stones.
In all walks of life, not all change can be resisted, and much of it should be embraced. However, few endeavours are as lucrative as English professional football, and so authorities should keep a keen eye on their sport’s popularity and its fundamental value proposition. The breathtaking speed and technical laxity of the 1990s – when Liverpool famously defeated Newcastle 4-3 two seasons in a row – has always been enabled by tolerant officiating by referees whose first instinct is to gesticulate that no foul has been committed.
Economics suggests that this is one tradition that may well be worth holding on to.
