It’s a thankless job, and one that isn’t paid particularly well either.
We’re not talking about traffic wardens, by the way, but football referees – who find themselves under the harshest of professional scrutiny….and open to malicious abuse and vitriol every week at the mercy of tens of thousands of fans.
When you look at how much they get paid (more on that later), it makes you wonder why anybody would want to be a football referee. What are the perks?
It’s an existential question that forced an extraordinary reaction from refs in Major League Soccer in the early weeks of the 2024 season. They basically downed tools and went on strike – failing to agree terms on a new collective bargaining agreement.
In America they call it a ‘lockout’ – when a union refuses to let its members work, which came about after the MLS failed to make satisfactory improvements to pay, scheduling and ‘quality of life’.
It makes you wonder….what would happen if something similar unfolded in the Premier League? Can referees go on strike – and what would happen to the fixture list if they did?
Locked Out
In the MLS, there’s two entities involved in the officiating of football matches: the Professional Referee Organization (PRO), who arrange which games the officials will be covering, and the Professional Soccer Referees Association (PSRA), who are the effective trade union of match officials.
The PSRA was not happy with a labour agreement discussed prior to the 2024 season, refusing to budge on their terms.
“The skyrocketing growth of MLS has significantly increased demands on officials mentally and physically, and as such has increased demands on both our professional and personal time,” so said PSRA president, Peter Manikowski.
So PRO ‘locked out’ the referees represented by the PSRA – preventing them from working, and drafted in match officials from the lower leagues of North American football, as well as from destinations as far flung as Poland and Jamaica.
Unfortunately, some of the replacement referees have been found wanting – leading to a number of player and coaches in the MLS to call upon PRO to sort a renegotiated deal.
“It’s just so infuriating when you work so hard for the time you do, and then such a blatant mistake really costs you,” said Kansas City, and former Derby County, man Johnny Russell after an incorrect call from a match official cost his side a goal.
Most embarrassingly, social media images from the archives showed one of the replacement referees, Guilherme Ceretta, wearing an Inter Miami shirt – just hours before he was scheduled to officiate Miami’s game with Orlando City.
All of which threatens the integrity and professionalism of the league itself, which is why anyone associated with the MLS breathed a sigh of relief when the PSRA and PRO finally shook hands on revised terms in March 2024.
The new collective bargaining agreement will run until 2030 and is the largest in MLS history – ensuring referees will be paid more than ever before.
That should at least comfort the blow of the dog’s abuse they receive on a weekly basis….
Have Football Referees Ever Gone On Strike in the UK?
Until now, referees at the very top level in England are yet to go on strike – how much longer that’s the case remains to be seen.
The picture is rather different at the grassroots level. There have been numerous coordinated walkouts in recent years – not over pay, but over the lack of protections that referees have in the face of violent players, coaches and supporters. One such strike action in 2017 saw more than 2,000 match officials refuse to work.
So dire is the situation in grassroots football that referees were allowed to wear body cameras in a coordinated trial in 2023 – such is the risk to their health and wellbeing.
Professional referees don’t suffer from a similar level of threat, but they too are subject to vile abuse and even death threats on a weekly basis – a situation that has been made all the worse, rather than bettered, by the introduction of VAR.
In the days when VAR was just a twinkle in the eye of the madman that invented it, top-level officials in both England and Scotland HAVE threatened to go on strike.
Back in 1993, when the Premier League era was just a year old, the Association of Premier League and Football League Referees and Linesmen threatened to go on strike if their members didn’t receive a pay rise – at the time, they earned an astonishing £145 for refereeing a Premier League game; even accounting for inflation, that’s just £298 for officiating in the biggest domestic league in world football.
Meanwhile in Scotland, strike action in 2010 saw referees walk out on their scheduled games – affecting the Scottish Premiership, the Scottish Football League and the Challenge Cup, which was to be held that fateful weekend in November.
The officials, represented by the Scottish Senior Football Referees’ Association, wanted better protections from public criticism, with several high-profile incidents seeing referees publicly belittled by irate players and managers.
The walkout was so significant that only four games in the top-four tiers of Scottish football went ahead on the weekend of November 27-28, with replacement referees called in from Israel, Malta and Luxembourg.
The strike action would last for just one round of games – the officials involved feeling that they had suitably proven their point. However, given that referees continue to be treated so appallingly, the jury is out on whether that’s actually the case.
Which Sports Have Had a Referee Walkout?
Football in England has, at the elite level at least, been lucky in the sense that its referees seem to be willing to put up with anything.
That’s not the case in many other sports, with few fortunate enough to get away without some kind of industrial action from their officials over the years.
Welsh Rugby
Rugby was dragged into the mire in 1996 when a collective action from the Welsh Society of Rugby Union Referees saw a number of games postponed – only one official, Alan Barham, agreed to cross the picket line.
NFL
Strike action is much more common in top-level sport in the United States. The NFL has been the subject of at least seven different walkouts on the part of its officials, typically over pay or working conditions.
The most recent of those, in 2012, saw all officials walk out after a failure to agree terms on a collective bargaining agreement – it meant that gameweek 3 of the NFL season was under threat, which would have cost the organisation and its teams a considerable amount of money.
So the show must go on, and replacement officials were called up from outside the NFL Referees Association – unfortunately, that meant that the quality of officiating fell just as it did in the MLS in 2024. A series of inaccurate decisions culminated in the infamous ‘Fail Mary’ contest between the Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers, in which a catalogue of referee failings were headlined by the final play of the game.
The Fail Mary!
A play both @Seahawks and @packers fans will never forget! pic.twitter.com/3SHM9MfHZ4
— NFL UK (@NFLUK) November 15, 2018
Eventually, the NFL and the NFL Referees Association came to an agreement on a collective bargaining package, and the usual referees returned to work – there’s been an uneasy truce ever since.
NBA
The NBA has also been the subject of referee walkouts, with a major strike action in 1995 changing the balance of power between the organisation and its officials ever since. So much so, when referees walked out during pre-season games in 2009, NBA chiefs came up with an improved offer within a matter of days – ensuring the league campaign started without a hitch.
MLB
The MLB has had four umpire walkouts since the 1970s – some lasting weeks, with replacement officials called up in 1984 to oversee some of the most important games of the campaign. A 1995 strike was called off thanks to the mediation tactics of one Richard Nixon.
NHL
Some 25 referees walked out on the NHL in 1993, unsatisfied by the 29% pay rise they were being offered. So the NHL had to find new referees as replacements – holding open auditions and training sessions, with each candidate hoping for their chance to earn $800 a game.
The quality of the officiating was, at times, questionable, with water bottles and other missiles thrown onto the ice in protest at some games. That only served to enhance the bargaining power of the normal NHL referees, who got the pay increase they wanted weeks after starting their action.
What Would Happen if Premier League Referees Went On Strike?
The antics of Premier League players and managers – let alone the fans in the stands – have become so bad that it seems that it’s only a matter of when, rather than if, referees will go on strike.
Mikel Arteta, Jurgen Klopp and Marco Silva are just three of the Premier League head coaches that have been charged with verbally or physically remonstrating with match officials over the past couple of seasons, and it’s true to say that what happens at the top level – and especially in televised games – is often repeated at grassroots levels….typically with more dire consequences.
One of the solutions, it was thought, would be VAR – the video-assisted officiating that would ensure more decisions are called correctly….thus reducing the amount of abuse that referees face.
Of course, that hasn’t been the case beyond all doubt, with VAR-backed decisions enjoying a ‘success rate’ of 96% – fractionally higher than the 82% back when match officials received no video help.
One of the main issues with VAR is that it makes the blood boil of supporters, players, coaches and pundits – be it the inaccuracy of the calls, the ‘user error’ or the inordinate amount of time it seems to make a decision. That fury is typically channelled in the direction of a scapegoat; with VAR officials sat safely in their cabin miles away, it’s referees and their assistants that typically face the ire.
Former referee Jeff Winter believes that conditions for officials are at an all-time low since the introduction of video technology.
“I blame everything on the ills of VAR because everyone is frustrated. All the players, all the management, the referees are all frustrated by it,” he said.
“We need to have a stop button and a reset button with football because if you throw everything into the mix, it’s not a nice place for a referee at the moment.”
They are a resilient bunch, these referees, with plenty of them coming back for more week after week. But there will be a line drawn in the sand if their working conditions don’t improve – strike action seems almost inevitable.
If, or when, it happens, Premier League chiefs will have a decision to make. Will they call off any games in which the nominated referee is on strike for, or will they carry on with the fixture list as normal – calling up referees from overseas or the lower leagues of English football? As other examples have shown, the latter option can be damaging to the quality of officiating; particularly when the replacement refs have never took the whistle games of such magnitude before.
Whichever way you look at it, a mass walkout from Premier League officials would be catastrophic to the integrity of the competition.
How Much Do Referees Get Paid?
There’s perhaps an argument to be made that if referees are paid a handsome salary, they can at least be expected to put up with more hassle out on the pitch – danger money, if you will.
But is that actually the case? In the Premier League, the answer is yes….nowadays, at least. Here’s how the pay for an EPL referee has increased over the years – figures from previous years have been adjusted for inflation to 2024 levels:
As you can see, the salary growth of Premier League referees has been almost perfect upward line since 1993, which suggests that they are being well looked after financially – there can’t be many vocations where the wage growth is as considerable as this.
What’s more, the 2023 numbers don’t tell the whole story. The basic salary for a new referee to the Premier League is £70,000 – some, it’s reported, earn as much as £200,000 a year. On top of that is the match fee, which is believed to be £1,500 per 90 minutes officiated.
It’s not too shabby, particularly when you compare EPL referees’ pay with that from other countries. It’s no wonder that MLS officials wanted to go on strike – here’s how their salary stacks up against the average pay in the United States:
The first figure is the amount that referees in Major League Soccer used to earn prior to their 2024 bargaining agreement was confirmed – the second is their new salary, moving forward, of $80,000 a year.
But the average salary for a worker in the United States is $77,000, according to census data, so referees are effectively considered to be no more important than a middle manager.
The picture isn’t quite as bleak in some other major footballing nations – in fact, referees get paid a rather royal sum in other countries. In Italy’s Serie A, for example, a referee can earn £140,000 per season (£48,000 salary, £3,300 per game).
And over in Spain, that figure rises to £202,000 for La Liga refs, when annual salary and match fees are combined.
Ironically, such exorbitance on the Med strengthens the hand of Premier League referees, who might argue that they simply aren’t paid enough compared to their continental counterparts.
A referee walkout in the Premier League? Don’t be surprised if – or when – it happens.