What happened in Turkey might easily have happened here, and if you think it can't you're only fooling yourself
It is frankly xenophobic to assume that the attack on a referee in Ankara this week could only happen abroad, especially when we've become so intemperate ourselves.
If we’re all completely honest with ourselves, we could see this coming, couldn’t we? It was inevitable that in the rising tide of anger within the weirdly hermetically sealed world of professional football would overspill somewhere, and it just so happened to finally boil over in Turkey.
On Monday evening, at the end of the Süper Lig match between Ankaragucu and Rizespor the Ankaragucu club president Faruk Koca got onto the pitch and punched referee Hamil Umut Meler in the face, knocking him to the ground. As if that wasn’t enough, while on the ground the referee was kicked by two others before various players, staff and officials formed a barrier around the stricken official.
And with that, Turkish football has been pushed into crisis. The Süper Lig was immediately and indefinitely suspended. Koca resigned his position. There have been rumours that head coach Emre Belozoglu is set to quit the club. In view of what happened, what on earth any ‘suitable’ punishment could even look like remains unimaginable. What referee could possibly feel safe going there again this season, or any season? Whatever happens to that club, there will be little to no sympathy for them.
Just as in so many other countries, tensions over the refereeing of matches had been building in Turkey for years. Clubs have been openly and explicitly accusing referees of bias for a long time. Just over year ago in the very same stadium, a fan got onto the pitch with the apparent intention of attacking the referee and was only stopped when he was shoved to the ground by a player before he could reach him. In 2019, a now former Rizespor club president said of a referee that, “If I had my gun, I would have shot him.”
Of course, it’s not too difficult to surmise that this level of extreme rhetoric might be unique to another country, that they’re somehow crazier than ‘we’ are, and that ‘we’ would never go that far. But it only takes a few seconds to understand that exactly the same circumstances have been percolating through the Premier League at the same time as they have elsewhere.
Managers have been blaming their own shortcomings on referees for years. Abrogating themselves of responsibility by scapegoating match officials long ago became par for the course, even if the language used has been less extreme than elsewhere. There was a Premier League manager watching matches from the stand because he couldn’t wind his neck in just last weekend, and his response to the ban was, of course, to double down and state that he wouldn't be keeping his own emotions in check.
Furthermore, both clubs and fan bases have started to come across as conspiracy theorists on a more or less routine basis. The Everton fans’ reaction to being deducted points for essentially cheating—the fact that they were so bad at cheating that they didn’t even benefit from it is frankly neither here nor there—was to start a campaign claiming that the Premier League was ‘corrupt’, and we’re now at the point at which it feels as though a good number of them have persuaded themselves that their club didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Clubs themselves have started issuing statements after matches that read like threats.
The language has become increasingly intemperate as time has progressed. The ‘Big Six’ is now routinely described as a ‘cartel’, even though there aren’t enough of them to be able to effect or block rule changes without votes from others as well. And everybody continues to vote on any proposed rule changes through their own narrow self-interest, to the exclusion of anything else.
For example, when the Premier League voted to limit to amortisation of player values on accounting spreadsheets, Chelsea, the club who’ve exploited this more than any other, voted in favour, presumably because these rules won’t be backdated and it allows them to pull up a drawbridge behind them. You could see the same phenomenon present and correct in the voting over curtailing temporary loans from related-party clubs in the January transfer window. Nobody ever gives any consideration to the good of the game any more. It’s all self, self, self, always. And of course, when you point this out as gently as you can you’re greeted with this wounded and accusative tone, as if the problem is the matter being mentioned rather than it happening in the first place.
Consider for a moment recent complaints about refereeing. When was the last time you heard a manager complaining about a refereeing decision which went in favour of their team? Have you ever? Of course you haven’t, because that’s never been the point of such complaints. The point has always been about narrow self-interest. And it’s been a low-risk strategy. No-one will ever speak up for referees, and not only does it deflect, but there may be a chance that it will influence the decision-making of others in future matches, as well.
We can see this from the way in which clubs react to VAR decisions. The only time that either fans or, it would seem, clubs themselves will accept VAR is when borderline decisions go their way. You’ll occasionally see comments on social media along the lines of, “Yeah, we’re complaining about standards. It’s all about declining standards”, which would be a more convincing argument if it was ever made when your team has just been awarded a contentious penalty kick or seen an opposing player sent off over a borderline decision.
And while there have been no physical attacks on referees in the professional game yet, grassroots football in Britain is already imploding because there are so few people left who’ll take a couple of hours worth of abuse in return for a few quid to referee games. Referees have been attacked with such frequency at that level of the game and for so long that it often doesn’t even make the media any more as anything other than a curio. It should come as no surprise whatsoever that a serious physical attack on a referee would happen in a high profile professional league would take place somewhere. In some respects, it’s almost a surprise that it took so long.
The idea that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ is so facile that it borders on xenophobic. This country is deeply intolerant. Two Members of Parliament have been murdered in the last decade. Political extremism is on the rise, and a toxic combination of entitlement and anger seems to be prevalent in just about every walk of life. The well has been poisoned here just as much as anywhere else, and the point at which a referee is attacked in a professional league here will be too late for caterwauling regret or “stunned” reactions to “disgusting” behaviour. We’ll only have ourselves to blame. Warnings have been issued for years, and no-one has taken a blind bit of notice. And most won’t, until it’s too late.