Referees among Most Important Players in Soccer Tournaments

T he claim I want to put forward is that the referees—and in their wake the linesmen and the fourth officials (assuming that the latter have some role to play)—are among the most important players in tournaments such as the European Championship (EC) and World Championship (WC) football, on an equal footing with the star players entering the pitch. If true, this is not as it should be. Which national team wins should be merely dependent on the performance of the football players. The referee should ideally play a strictly neutral role in this respect, but this is not the case, even if the referee has no preference or interest whatsoever in which team wins. The fact is that he has to make hard decisions during the match, which determines to a large extent the ultimate winner. For this to be true, two conditions have to be met. First, there is no towering favorite player who beats all opponents during the course of the tournament with a margin of two goals or more. The most recent exception is the Dutch team in 1974 winning all matches with a margin of two goals or more except finally losing against West Germany. Probably more informative is that only 3 of all 40 matches from the quarterfinals onwards on the important tournaments in between 1994 and 2004—the WC ‘94, the EC ‘96, the WC ‘98, the EC 2000, the WC 2002, and EC 2004 (see Tables 1 and 2 below)—end with a difference of more than one goal. Even after extra time because of a draw in the regular time, 37 matches end with a difference of only one goal or are decided by a series of penalties. Ex ante, it is therefore not exaggerated to say that whether or not the final champion will reach the final and also wins is a matter of brute luck, depending on how the dice rolls and on the crucial decisions made by the refereeing officials during the course of the tournament. Second, the referee has to make many decisions during a match in a split second, so even if he intends to be impartial in an impeccable way, he will inevitably have a huge impact on the course and outcome of a match. There are numerous occasions during a match that the referee or linesmen can decide to give the benefit of doubt to one team or the other (e.g., to give

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