Europe is in a football fever with the 15th edition of the EUFA European Championship starting tomorrow. And while media is full with- and ready to cover all the news on the football teams and players, participating; the referees seem to be somehow left outside the main spotlight.
Of course, not every football referee can achieve the fame and media presence of the Italian Pierluigi Collina, considered the best referee of his generation, or the British Thing from Tring – Graham Poll.
This time, the 51 matches at Euro 2016 tournament will be served by 112 match officials separated into 18 referee teams – where each team will comprise of one main referee, two additional assistant referees, two assistant referees and a reserve third assistant referee. To add up to the teams, two referees and two assistant referees will serve as fourth reserve officials.
All things said, what does a referee actually refer to? It might come as a surprise to some, but the word referee, indeed, derives from the verb “to refer” (which, on its end, is partly a borrowing from French and partly from Latin) and the referee, simply put, is one who is referred to, and in sport and contest context – one whose judgement to refer to when applying the game’s rules.
The word referee was formed within the English language to firstly appear in print in 1549 and to generally name a person to whom any matter or question in dispute is referred for decision, an arbiter – as for example in the 1660s The diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke: “He was a Referee of the differences betwixt Dr Colladon, & Dr de Vaux, but could not agree them.”
Earlier in the 17th century, the word entered the legal vocabulary to name a person to whom (either alone or with others) a dispute between parties is referred by mutual consent; an arbitrator. As the English merchant and governor of the East India Company, Josiah Child, wrote in his A new discourse of trade: “While we choose our Judges our selves..they can be no more too arbitrary than too much power can be given to Referees, when both parties desire an end of their Differences”.
The word received an official legal status, so to say, when between 1873 and 1972 was used as a “job title” for judicial officers of the British Supreme Court of Judicature to whom complex or technical matters could be referred.
By the early 1800s, referees found their role in sports, in association football, in particular. Originally the team captains had to resolve any disputes, consulting each other, later each team would bring their own umpire (arbitrator) and eventually a third neutral official was added, a referee to be refereed to if the umpires could not resolve a dispute.
The first written record on the place and role of the sport referees comes in reference to boxing, from Pierce Egan’s Boxiana, where in 1828 he writes that: “No persons but the Umpires and Referee can be stationed close to the ropes”.
In 1891, the umpires in association football became linesmen (now assistant referees) and the head referee came to have the central and final authority on all rulings on the football field.
