the puzzle of finding referees

Featured this month on the occasion of arbitration days, referees are increasingly difficult to recruit.

From October 4 to 27, the men and women “in black”, as all their jerseys were originally, are in the spotlight. Refereeing days are organized each year by La Poste to highlight the work of these people without whom sporting events could not be held.

Except that today, it is more and more difficult to find them for amateur sport. In basketball for example, while there have never been so many players (750,000 members), it is sometimes a headache to find them, as Johan Jeanneau, referee trainer for the Federation explains. : “At the departmental level, there are plenty of matches where club referees officiate, sometimes even without training.”

And when there are, it is sometimes difficult to remember them. This is the case in football, where more than half quit before the end of their second season, tired of loneliness and sometimes violence, regrets Antony Gautier, boss of referees at the French Football Federation: “On a field, when a young referee hears parents criticizing him throughout the match, it is not necessarily very motivating for the young person.”

To try to stem this phenomenon, the federation has doubled its budget for leagues and districts to better support young referees. But above all, what is needed is to convince them of the interest they can find in being a referee, for Johan Jeanneau: “They gain self-confidence, they are leaders, they learn to make decisions, to argue, to accept their mistakes, to self-analyze.”

According to a La Poste survey, 90% of recruiters value candidates who have worked as referees.