The Toolstation Western League Podcast’s latest interview has been with Martin Cassidy, Chief Executive Officer of Ref Support UK, a charity committed to supporting Referees for the good of its members and in the interests of the beautiful game. Host of the podcast, local sports reporter and commentator, Ian Nockolds, catches up with Martin again to talk about the challenges referees face and the strategies being developed to help them.

Ian Nockolds: “Well, I’m delighted to welcome back to the Toolstation Western League podcast, Martin Cassidy, the Chief Executive Officer of Ref Support UK. Martin, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us. I see you’ve been busy on social media as ever, but what else have Ref Support been doing during the lockdown?”

Martin Cassidy: “We’ve been doing quite a lot. We are looking at clips, where Referees are learning from what other people have done wrong, but also learn about what they’ve done right. And it’s a thing that’s been really, really popular. To such an extent that sponsors approached us to put the name to it, and we think it’d be great to have Managers involved with that.

“What we’ve always said, as a charity, and because we’re independent to the FA, we don’t want to shut the doors on anyone. And we know we can learn from Managers, clubs, and fans, and we want to be able to engage with them. Having them look at a clip with us, I think it’d be fun, I think it’d be educational. I think we’d all learn from each other – so that’s one big thing that we did.

“Another was we launched an app, a free Mental Health app. Download it for free, you fill it all in, and it sends you messages to say ‘how are you feeling today? Grade yourself.’ So when you pick your phone up, you get a message saying ‘how are you feeling today? And you score yourself. Then, in that score that says ‘oh, look, you know, you’re not feeling too positive today, here you are, here’s a video, click on the video’. And there will be a famous person on that video saying: “Look, I’ve been through a dark time or a difficult time, this is what I did, positivity.”

“For refs this has really helped us and a couple of players have picked up on it, which is brilliant, it really does get some positivity going. And we’ve launched another app, which is the first time it’s been used in football across the world. A whistle-blowing app, you know, whistle blowing for whistle-blowers!

“We had lots of people in football saying, ‘I’m not heard, I’m not heard’. We have leagues saying to us, who don’t know how to stand up to the FA or the fear that if they do stand up to the FA, they may get some funding cut. Or, we have referees who want to stand up but they’re scared they might not get promoted, they might get sent to the ‘rubbish clubs’ who give them bad marks every game, they won’t get a Cup Final. So there’s lots and lots of things out there that we just felt, from an independent point of view.

“It’s a fully anonymous app. You download the app, you register in whatever name you want – absolutely whatever name you want. Then they get sent to an independent third body. They’ll get that information, and they’re all high ranking ex-police, who know how to investigate things. They’ll collate all of that together. And what’s been missing from football, and particularly from a referee-players perspective, is that if you have six or seven clubs, who have all reported that a referee is below standard, no one collates that. A league will get a report, but they don’t seem to collate it to say, hang on, seven clubs in one season can’t be wrong, this needs looking at.

“Straight away, we feel that this would be positive for clubs to engage with. So we can send it to them, they can go back to the FA and say, ‘Are you supporting that referee? Have they got their own challenges?’

“And equally, with clubs constantly getting reported for being really bad, particularly Managers on the benches and stuff like that, no one seems to collate that either and say: ‘Look, seven referees can’t be wrong, they’ve all reported that same individual’. So, we think that’s a really important way of “whistleblowing” and trying to make the game better, but you can protect yourself because it is completely anonymous.”

IN: “Are both of those apps publicly available or are they only available to your Referees?”

MC: “We did the sponsorship deals with the company as an individual. One of them is done under a charity called Street Soccer Foundation, which is in every Premier League club. It’s about getting homeless people off the streets, into a football environment where they feel like a part of something, share all the problems they’ve had, learn soft skills, more employability, all that engagement, all that positivity.

“So they launched this app and we said ‘look, can we use it in our world?’ and they said ‘yeah, please do.’ So that app is all free, just go down onto the Street Soccer Foundation website, the app is called matchFit, download for free and go and see what you think of it. Any feedback to us via you, Ian, about the app would be absolutely wonderful.

“For the Alethia Whistleblowing app, go on our social media feeds, particularly Twitter, @refsupportuk on Twitter, you’ll see all the apps are on there, download and have a look. And let’s see if all of football; stakeholders players, Managers, teams and Referees, can all have free extra support.

“IN: Well, it’s really interesting to hear you talk about that mental health app because last week, we did an interview with the charity, Mind, talking about what it’s like for fans and other people involved in football, to be coping with the loss of football, particularly during the second lockdown.

“But, of course, it struck me that when we talk about people involved in football, we often forget about the match officials, because they’re as involved as the rest of us. Has your organisation been supporting match officials with their mental health needs during this difficult time?”

MC: “Yes, both apps were particularly important and are part of mechanisms supporting the mental health of match officials, because the frustration can build up where they can’t say anything, they don’t want to report something to the FA or their line manager. Because they fear that line manager might say ‘oh, you’re not mentally strong enough. You’re not down for promotion, you’re not down for big Cup Finals, local derbies, you know, particularly on Boxing Day, New Year. So they won’t report it. So I want them to come to us and be able to do it anonymously, a) to let them be able to get it off their chest, b) they know we’ll keep it to ourselves, we won’t go anywhere with it and c) really important, if we do go anywhere with it, they can remain anonymous. So it’s a three-pronged attack there for their mental health.

“Of course with the app, from the other side, you can use it, it sends you messages daily, ‘how are you feeling?’ you can score it, you can go into it, it’ll give you motivational messages, all free, give you a little bit of a shot in the arm and make you feel better and ready for those challenges ahead. So that’s been really important. One of the things that really, really made us go down this route was, you might have seen on Twitter, the Satyam Toki case, where he got punched, the Referee ends up being hospitalised, serious mental health issues which, he’s fine he’s getting much better now, you know, and then he got no support. No one offered him any form of welfare support, any mental health from the FA, or the County FA.

“It’s not automatic that they phone up the Referee. They might drop them an email, but he wants a call, wants to be able to hear a voice. They are not very good at that, the FA. In fairness to this one, Steve Tanner, who was a West Country lad, he works at Wembley, he did phone him in fairness, he’s the only one from PO box 1966 at Wembley, who contacted him, but the County FAs involved didn’t. So of course we were really important in that support mechanism for him mentally, and I’m glad to say that we’re still supporting going forward. There’s things developing with the FA at Wembley, we are really happy, we’re about changing things going forward. So that’s a good example, if we had had that app.

IN: “I saw the coverage that you put out about the incident on social media, but I also heard the case discussed at length on talkSPORT. So the work of your organisation, for that particular match official, helped to put into the public spotlight national attention the incident that occurred. I think it’s a huge feather in your cap, because really by doing that, by making it impossible for the footballing public not to know about that incident, not to talk about that incident, I think that was incredibly effective. Effective in bringing about change, and it was the sort of change that that needed to be brought about, because I’m sure that, sadly, officials (and you’ll know the statistics better than I) match officials across the country have to put up with that type of abuse on a weekly basis.”

MC: “Absolutely. You know, we’ve talked about it a lot from a mental health point of view, from a physical point of view. We know, the FA know, they say it’s 0.01% of games, where Referees get proven cases of assault. The word ‘proven’ is really important in their statistics, because that’s all what they view of their cases. When a player does something wrong, goes to the hearing, gets found proven. They don’t tell you how many of those hearings were not proven. That’s irrelevant in the case of what happened, the referee deemed that to be assault, and reported him, also the FA brought in another charge, which dilutes the salt down to ‘contact with match official’. We understand you need to frame it differently. You know, a little push, go away Ref, on your shoulder is nowhere near as severe as three punches or a headbutt, we get that, but they don’t seem to add all them in together, of assault. And really, touching a match official is a serious offence; no matter what way you do it. If you pat them on the back and say ‘fair play Ref’, happy days, that’s fine! We understand that will not be resulting in a charge. So, from what we know, referees aren’t reporting it because they don’t believe it gets dealt with robustly enough, and look at this case with Satyam. Five years. He punched him three times, he cut his eye, he tried to bribe him. That was the minimum sanction the FA could give, they gave it to that person, it just tells us they’re not taking it seriously, so referees are the same. So the FA can never claim that their figures, statistically, are correct.

“We believe it’s about six to eight Referees a week, that get assaulted. This is what we know from people talking to us, who say ‘I’ve been assaulted. I’m not gonna report it, because last time, nothing happened’. At our level of football and below, you’re very, very likely to bump into people that you’ve got to deal with in a football environment. That stops referees reporting assaults and similar issues. They’re going to bump into them in a pub, they’re going to bump into them on a school run, they’re going to bump into them in a supermarket.

“We’ve had a Referee spat at in front of his wife and kids in a supermarket, because he sent him off and he missed the Cup Final. Really? Is that acceptable in our game? So these mental health challenges, we know we’ve had . . . Think of the area of Wiltshire, some of our finest men in the country in these military garrisons. Some of these referee, they can handle themselves, absolutely no doubt about it. They are being threatened, but choose not to do anything about it, trusting in the system to punish that person properly. And the system doesn’t do that. I could almost guarantee the way things are going, there’s going to be a Referee who hits back. And the FA needs to take responsibility for that.”

Part 2 of this interview next week...