The age discrimination legislation has caught up with refereeing - to the benefit of one local referee. I am often asked by people, no doubt looking at my grey hair, whether there is any age limit for referees. The answer is
'no' as far as local football is concerned. There are, in several parts of the country, referees in the eighties. I remember one referee in High Wycombe who didn’t take up the whistle until he retired at sixty five. He was a fit man; cycling to all his matches, whatever the weather. It’s when referees move up out of local football that age restrictions have applied.
If a referee wants to progress, there are four levels after leaving local football before he can reach the top nationally, the Select List of referees who control the Premiership matches.
The first step is the supply
leagues, which locally are the Hellenic, Combined Counties and Suburban. Next are the Contributory leagues such as Ryman and Dr Marten’s. Their next promotion would be to the Panel, which takes in the Conference and Football Combination. From there
referees can progress to the National List, which means the Football League and then, if they are very lucky, they can make it to the Select List, where they would get an annual salary as well as match fees.
Each one of these stages has had its own age limit, starting with the Premiership and getting younger as it works down. But it is worse than that. Say the age limit was forty two and a referee reaches that level at the age of forty; he would not be promoted as he would only be able to give two years service before he was too old, and that was not considered enough. On top of this, everyone has to start as an assistant referee at each step before getting to the middle.
This has meant that unless you started refereeing at a young age, you never had the opportunity of getting to the top. Many good referees, because they didn’t start refereeing until they stooped playing, never progressed out of local football. This also applies to professional footballers, who many people feel might make good referees. One or two have made it to the National List but generally their age has been against them. It has also meant that referees who are perfectly capable of carrying out their duties and
meet the fitness requirements have, when they reached the magic age, had to retire.
You may wonder why age limits were introduced in the first place. It was done because some referees would get half way up the ladder but weren’t good enough to get to the next stage, so they stayed there. This created a blockage in the system, which prevented good young referees getting through. A committee was set up to investigate the problem and the result was
the Stonick Report which recommended age limits.
Now that the current age restrictions cease to apply, how will decisions be based for the promotion and removal of referees? The answer is what the FA is calling
'a robust performance analysis system', combined with the fitness test programme.
So if a referee is good enough and fit enough then he stands every chance of being retained, irrespective of his age. Referees will also get more frequent feedback
about how they are doing on the merit rating programme, and there will be a better coaching scheme to help those coming through. This at present only applies to referees on their way up, Premiership referees will be looked at separately.
I think everyone will feel this is a better system and certainly for one local referee it has paid dividends. Mike Rowley,
a member of the Reading RA, has this season been promoted to the line of the Football League at the age of 41, which certainly wouldn’t have happened before.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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© R Sawdon Smith 2007