referees targeted during matches, a phenomenon that continues to grow

Since the start of the season, referees have been increasingly targeted during matches. Attacks, intimidation, insults… here are the lot of incidents that referees suffer, especially in amateur football. Seine-Maritime, Bouches-du-Rhône, Seine-et-Marne, attacks are numerous and concern all French regions.

>>> Referee attacked during a football match: “I can’t get over it, I demand that justice be done”, testifies the victim

Stage 2 investigated this phenomenon. Maxime Foulon, referee, speaks for the first time on camera since his attack. “We ask ourselves a thousand questions. Do I stop? If we are not accompanied in these moments, yes we stop”, he explains.

In response to this violence, the French Football Federation (FFF) has put in place a series of individual and collective measures, effective from the start of the next school year, to stem this problem. “Among all the measures that we have recommended, there is in particular a toughening of the disciplinary scale, a systematic withdrawal of points with suspension as soon as there is an attack on the referee for the club”, lists Eric Borghini, president of the federal commission of referees. A first step, which everyone hopes is sufficient, to draw a line under this scourge.