Late last month, UEFA head of referees Roberto Rosetti stood in front of a PowerPoint presentation and made an impassioned simple plea: “We need referees!”
He pointed out that roughly one in seven registered match officials quit the game every year and that while football is booming around Europe, with increasing numbers of teams and leagues both in the men’s and women’s game, the pool of match officials isn’t keeping up. Across UEFA’s 55 member associations, they’re about 40,000 referees short.
“It’s a vocational crisis,” he said, using a terminology most often associated with young people not opting to join the clergy. Rosetti is a former FIFA referee who today is the high priest of European match officials, charged with (among other things) leading the selection and assignment of referees in the Champions League and Euros. It stands to reason that he’d speak in quasi-religious terms because, let’s face it: officiating is a calling.
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