What is it like to be a Premier League referee? An interview with Graham Scott
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Tom Burrows
Scott refereed in the Premier League for a decade before retiring in 2024. He has spoken to The Athletic about his career...
“I’ve likened it to a game of Snakes And Snakes. So while there is one career ladder, it’s surrounded by snakes, and you can only ever get knocked back. So it’s a very, very long and tough resilience test.”
Former Premier League referee Graham Scott, who retired at the end of last season, is lifting the lid on the unforgiving life of a ref.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Athletic that offers rare insight into a typically guarded profession, he talks about the sacrifices required to reach the top and the human cost involved. Football is a notoriously brutal industry, where referees are often singled out for abuse.
He also addresses the technical demands of refereeing, detailing why he’s firmly against the idea of officials explaining their decisions to reporters after games, the differences between overseeing Premier League matches and those in the second-tier Championship, his experience as a VAR official, and his belief that English referees deserve far greater appreciation from fans.
Scott, 57, first took up refereeing as a hobby in 1997, while working as a journalist at the Nursing Standard — a journal for those in that medical profession. He juggled that full-time job with officiating at weekends and travelling to midweek evening fixtures.
He quickly climbed the ranks, then spent 17 years officiating in the Football League and a decade at Premier League level.
Alongside the dedication it requires, becoming a referee often invites significant vitriol and abuse, with the amount of scrutiny only heightened when officials reach the top flight.
“There’s often a misconception that referees aren’t accountable, that they’ll just go home and watch the telly and don’t care,” Scott says. “Really, it’s nothing like that at all. It hurts you. You don’t want to affect the game negatively.”
Scott says he did not find refereeing Premier League matches themselves stressful, but that dealing with their aftermath — particularly when contentious decisions were involved — was far more challenging.
“It was the noise that could come from the media, and more recently social media. You just had to try and avoid it,” Scott explains. “Then being assessed and getting a mark, getting a report; if that was negative, that would have a negative effect on you.”
How did he handle the inevitable abuse that came with the territory?
“In my case, I either just ignored it, and then a few days later it was safe to open the paper or get your phone out, or I’d embrace it,” Scott replies. “So if I knew something had gone a bit wobbly, and there was likely to be a pile-on, sometimes I would go, ‘Come on, let’s see how bad it really is’. I’d usually found it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
“But in terms of how we cope with it, I think you build so many layers of skin on your way up through your career that you become hardened. And most of it you can dismiss as partisan nonsense, confected rage, (and) people who just have no understanding. You’re more interested in criticism from your peers and from people who are knowledgeable in the game. If your colleagues say you’ve got that one wrong, you know you have. We were critical friends to each other.”
In addition to that, Scott says it was hard to switch off after a match, as he’d often replay decisions in his head.
Scott showing a red card during a game between Brighton and Wolves (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
That was particularly the case in the Football League, the three divisions below the Premier League, as a referee can leave the stadium after a game without knowing if they’d got a key decision right or not.
“You wait until you get home and then you get to see it, so it’s whirring around in your head until then,” Scott says. “Most of those journeys are all on your own. So I used to ring a friend, who was a referee, and talk through the game. That call of duty could last the whole journey.”
However, Scott is adamant this would only make things more tricky.
“We would only be asked about errors, or perceived errors,” he says. “Managers get interviewed when they win, so there is an upside. Players get interviewed when they have scored the winning goal. They don’t put the goalkeeper who made an absolute howler up for interview and ask, ‘What were you thinking?!’
“For the odd occasion when it would work, there’d be many more where it would actually deteriorate relations.”
A notable change this season, though, has seen referees announce to the in-stadium crowd the reasons behind decisions following VAR interventions.
“The referees had a big concern about that before the announcements came in, as our voices would now be heard,” Scott says. “You were a silent participant before. And those announcements are really, really challenging.”
Scott says that was another factor as to why VAR checks can take so long — a maddening process for supporters, especially those at the match involved.
“It’s not always easy to explain why we give one thing and not another, because the laws of the game are deliberately open to interpretation,” Scott says.
“I have seen occasions when the referee’s been on the VAR screen a long time, and the assumption from the pundits is there’s doubt about the decision. And I can guarantee, because I know the process, that what has actually happened is they’re thinking, ‘OK, I’ve made my decision, and I’m now going to overturn my original call. What am I going to say?’, so you can see the wheels (in their head) turn.
“I never had to do one (an announcement), but I did the rehearsals last season. There were times when, if you had a complicated decision, or a situation with two events at once, it’s really difficult.”
Having to make such tough calls in a highly pressured environment makes refereeing a unique industry. Does that mean there’s a sense of camaraderie among the profession?
“It can be like a football team where, if you’re on the bench… do you want the person who’s in your position to perform well today? There can be that tension, but when the really big calls come, when the pressure is at its highest, and the scrutiny is at its greatest, we stick together,” Scott replies.
Referees meet up in person for a monthly three-day training camp in Loughborough, near Leicester in the English Midlands, which includes physical sessions, video analysis and a review of key match incidents. Alongside this, they receive VAR training, a weekly online call and mentorship from a former Premier League referee, as well as access to psychological support and nutritional guidance.
Scott, who lives in Oxfordshire, noted that another tricky aspect of the job is how observers assume they are experts, and are quick to berate the referees. “It’s only fingers on one hand, the number of decisions in an entire season, 380 games (in a Premier League campaign), well over a thousand key match incidents, where I could not explain to you why they made that decision,” he says.
In his view, this season there have been only two obvious mistakes.
Scott says the introduction of VAR changed how matches in the top flight were officiated compared with the rest of the English pyramid.
He explains how, in the Championship, referees were told to give decisions promptly, unlike in the Premier League, where officials were encouraged to wait and see how a situation developed, because of VAR. That is because if a referee blows their whistle too soon, the VAR cannot then intervene.
Scott admits that the transition took some getting used to.
“You’ve probably spent 15 to 20 years to get to the Premier League, you’re refereeing every weekend and every match you do is the same process. But now you’ve got to do it differently,” he says.
“The other thing is, when you referee a Championship game, sometimes you make a mistake, and there’s no way of putting it right. You’ve just got to knuckle down and get on with it. Put yourself in the Premier League and, almost every time, the VAR bails you out.
“But that means you’ve got to cope with knowing you’ve got a decision wrong, so you’ve got to reset. When we first had VAR, a lot of referees struggled with being told they were wrong during a game. That’s improved, because we’ve got used to processes and we’d much rather be put right than find out after the match that we affected the outcome.”
The advent of the review system also saw match officials working for the first time as VARs. Scott says this involves a completely different skill set to operating out on a pitch with two sets of players, as there’s far more emphasis on the process, which brought its own stresses because there was no margin for error.
“I don’t know anyone who enjoys being a VAR, but people enjoy the challenge,” Scott says.
Scott says he had no training for being a fourth official (Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
He remembered working as the VAR during the FA Cup semi-final between Watford and Wolves at Wembley in 2019 — where he says he “came out feeling completely rinsed” as he’d had to check five goals.
“I really had no idea that it was actually quite an exciting match,” he says (Watford won 3-2, having come back from two goals down and forced extra time by scoring a stoppage-time penalty).
Referees also spend time as the fourth official, a role where they are stationed in and around the technical areas and sometimes resembles being a verbal punchbag for the two sets of bench personnel to vent their frustration over calls made by the referee and his two assistants running the lines.
“I had no training in being a fourth official for 20 years,” Scott says. “And yet I did it 300-something times. You just learn that a lot of it is about people managing.”
How did he handle a situation when confronted with an irate manager in his face?
“I tried different approaches for different people,” he says. “That could involve blanking them, it could involve engaging them, it could involve stepping forward, (or) stepping back.
“I would never defend the indefensible. (But) Just because the decision is wrong, it doesn’t mean you get to behave how you like.”
Before we wrap up, Scott is asked if he believes English referees are judged fairly.
“Every country in the world has the worst refs,” he replies. “Ask the fans, and they’ll all tell you, ‘Oh, refs here are rubbish’. English referees around the world have a good reputation. Sometimes you’ll have a country that has a really big local derby or a cup final, and they import an English referee to do it.
“We are appreciated for letting the game flow in a way that no other country does. So if you look up the average number of free kicks per game in Spain, compared to England, it’s higher. There are also more yellow and red cards in Spain than in England. That largely explains why the Premier League is watched more than any other league — because of the way it’s refereed.
“And it seems that isn’t appreciated by anyone in the game.”
