During the 2002 World Cup when watching the referees, I noticed that they all seemed to have a black line on the inside of their coloured shirts. I thought it was it was part of their shirt but afterwards I realised it was their heart monitors strapped to their chests showing through.
Originally invented in Australia for swimmers and then refined as a training tool for the Finnish National Cross Country Ski Team, the monitors swept the athletic world in the 1990s. Heart monitors are now commonplace in football, all referees performing at the top echelons of the game, wear them for every game and for training.
Last week, in company with other Reading referees, I had sight of a graph showing the heartbeat of Football League referee Paul Melin during one his matches. It gave us some fascinating insights into the world of top flight refereeing
The normal standing heart beat rate for males is between 64 and 72 beats a minute, with a maximum at the age of forty, of about 180 beats a minute. Paul’s average heart beat during the game was 158 which is more than twice the normal rate and he has reached a maximum of 192 almost three times the average.
The graph of course showed highs and lows. One particular low was perhaps predictably at a lull in the game whilst he was waiting for a substitution to be made. Intriguingly though, one of the highs was also when he was standing still but on this occasion he was sending off a player. So, although a referee may look perfectly calm on the outside when he is showing a player the red card, inside his heart is beating at thirteen to the dozen..
Referees always believe they put the same effort into every game, but Paul made another interesting discovery with his heart monitor. It shows his heart beat rate is always higher when he referees a Championship match, as opposed to when he is in the middle of a League 1 or League 2 game. No doubt this corresponds with the pace of the game, which gets faster the higher you go.
I suppose most people know how heart rate monitors work. The chest strap has electrodes in contact with the skin to monitor the electrical voltages in the heart. When a heart beat is detected a radio signal is sent out to a receiver which the referee wears on his wrist. Its looks like a wrist watch in fact it doubles as a watch. This wrist receiver is then downloaded to a computer, which can produce graphs such as the one we were viewing.
Incidentally, all top level referees have to have a computer these days, for all their appointments are sent by e-mail on a Monday morning. Very different from when I was in senior football and you got an envelope at the beginning of the month with the fixtures and appointments for the rest of the month.
The graph from the game is not used for any
particular purpose but referees must also wear the heart monitor when they undertake their prescribed three times a week training sessions. The League then knows whether the referee has been training hard enough, for the information is forwarded by computer from the wrist receiver to the League fitness co-ordinator. A kind of long distance internet big brother. There no way referees can get out of it. If they don’t send in their heart beat monitored result, they simply won’t be appointed to a game the next week.
The idea of course is that the fitter a referee is, the nearer he will be to play and so likely to make better decisions. The FA are sometimes accused of being old-fashioned but here they are using modern technology for the benefit of the game.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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© R Sawdon Smith 2007