Cue much gnashing of teeth in the English media that have picked up on the story, with demands of various punishments for the president and in the English media, a spot of suggesting by implication that it wouldn’t happen in England because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, we’re English. The referee has also claimed that the president had threatened to kill him before.
And certainly if that last accusation is true, the authorities are guilty of gross negligence in allowing the referee to take that game and the club president to be there.
The whole story since then has been something of a debate over the exact sequence of events – did two other people on the pitch kick the referee when he was down, what Koca said to the referee about “finishing him off” and of course pictures of the black eye the referee received.
Further reports suggest that three individuals attacked the referee and have been arrested. There are denials from the accused that the individuals hit the referee in the face. These however get minor mentions in the media as the notion of being innocent until proven guilty does not pertain to newspaper reports over events outside the UK.
The Minister of Justice has said that three men have been arrested for the crime of “injuring, on a sports field in a way that resulted in a fracture, [of] a public official who was performing their public duty.” Koca has admitted he slapped the referee in the face, nothing more, while adding that “The slap I gave does not cause a fracture” according to Anadolu.
The Turkish Football Federation has indefinitely postponed matches in all of the country’s leagues following the attack and announced that criminal proceedings have been initiated.
Other responses could have been written before the event, but as it was Infantino was yet again able to place himself center-stage saying, “There is no place for violence in football, on or off the field.” I think we already knew that.
So as expected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned the attack in a statement posted on X/Twitter.
But what is not mentioned is that many referees who work in schoolboy and amateur football will tell you that this is not a situation that is special to adult football or football in other countries. We have it here as well and at all levels is the authorities’ total refusal to engage fully in debate and explanation. All they do is condemn, and that is a major problem for football in England, which has now spread throughout European football from school level to internationals that is causing the problem.
As a result, anger rises because it becomes impossible to get any believable assurances that the referee is not biased or incompetent or both.
Once belief in the system of refereeing comes to be questioned, there are no ways left of convincing everyone from players to club owners, from fans to casual observers that there is nothing wrong with the whole system of football governance and refereeing.
From that point it is an incredibly long way back, and indeed once fans have started to lose faith in the system of refereeing, appeals and the like it can be nigh on impossible to restore faith in the refereeing.
A very substantial number of people who watch football now have no faith in any aspect of the authorities that run the game – as indeed we have seen with Everton fans turning en masse against the Premier League after its 10-point deduction and the calling of the system “corrupt”.
Of course fans have always been biased in favour of their own club and feel that the referees are out to get them. But now that feeling runs at a much higher temperature, and the chances are we are not too far away from a copy of the Turkish incident in a PL club shortly.
Of course, PGMO could do something about this straightaway by liberalising and opening up discussion on the refereeing in matches, with interviews of referees, plus clear details of how referees are selected for the Premier League, and above all, why the number of referees is kept so low that we have the insanity of some only overseeing a handful of games a season while others work every week and take in some Arbaian matches on the side for good measure.
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