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I'm sorry but maybe you are confusing "football" with "American football"? In "soccer" (ahem), the game is completely subject to the ref's discretion. If the re
by ScottWhigham 12y ago
I'm sorry but maybe you are confusing "football" with "American football"? In "soccer" (ahem), the game is completely subject to the ref's discretion. If the ref gives a red card in the first minute, it will affect the game. If the ref chooses not to give that red card, it will affect the game and how it is played. There's no other logical way to view it.
- toyg 12y agoThere is no such thing as "American football", that's gridiron ;) Back to the subject, what I meant is that the fact that the ref has power of life and death over a game is a side effect of his role as the enforcer of rules; but we don't define the game of football as "the game where you have a referee", do we? The essence of football is in its rules, not in how they are enforced; otherwise people couldn't play it in parks without refs. If tomorrow we could have a perfect "refbot" software that can automatically call fouls from TV with better accuracy than human referees, using it wouldn't mean that we are not playing "football" anymore -- the game would be exactly the same, only rules would be enforced without a human ref. (as a sidenote, such a refbot would wipe out a lot of corruption overnight, and I for one would welcome it with open arms -- never again should we see shambolic farces like the 2002 World Cup, Henry's and Maradona's "Hands of God", etc etc).