LISTENING to the bampots who bombard Clyde 1 Superscoreboard with irate calls about biased match officials in the days, the weeks even, after Celtic and Rangers have played each other must take Drew Herbertson back.
Herbertson worked for the Scottish Football Association (SFA) for nearly 40 years, for many of them as the head of the disciplinary and refereeing department, and has heard the paranoid conspiracy theories countless times before.
He was the unfortunate individual who had the unenviable task of dealing with complaints from members of the public in the immediate aftermath of the world-famous fixture.
“I used to kid my colleagues on and say I could have a better phone-in than some of the radio stations,” said Herbertson with a laugh and a shake of his head.
“I would be trying to get on with my work and the calls would flood in. Punters would go mental after an Old Firm game if their side had lost.
“Each set of fans has exactly the same standpoint even though they are on opposite sides, exactly the same. They always think they are being hard done by and always believe the other lot are being favoured.
“Ultimately, it all just washed over me. I got used to it. I had some regular callers and I would always chat away to them. But sometimes you wondered why on earth they had bothered to phone up. It could be terrible. Go and get a life!”
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Football Refereeing in Scotland: A History of its Organisation and Development, the book which Herbertson wrote after retiring from his role at the governing body five years ago and has just had published, backs up his long-held view about the spurious claims of sinister agendas which have persisted for decades.
The meticulously-researched, well-written and engrossing tome, which he compiled after scouring the SFA archives from their formation in 1873 until 2023 as well as the referees’ committee minutes, proves that allegations of favouritism in the game in this country are completely without foundation.
“Bias does not exist in refereeing in Scotland,” he said. “It never has. Ever. A referee would be found out extremely quickly if he was guilty of bias. He would never progress.
“Referees have got to decide in a split second about what they have just seen and then adjudicate. They would never be able to say, ‘Alright, I favour that team so I’ll give the decision to them’. Making a wrong decision and a bias decision would stand out so badly. Bias doesn’t exist.”
Not even back in the late 19th and early 20th century when it was actually senior SFA officials, club representatives who had risen to positions of prominence in the embryonic organisation, who took charge of the big matches of the day? Apparently not.
“I was amazed to find that many of the top games were refereed by guys in top positions in football,” said Herbertson. “It was not uncommon for SFA presidents, vice-presidents, council members and secretaries to referee matches.
“You had a referee and two umpires back then. The umpires were on the field, one in each half. If there was any real dispute the umpires would say, ‘Okay, we need to speak to the referee’. He would be off the pitch. The umpires effectively became the linesman we have today. 
“When the International Football Association Board formalised the role of the referee in the Laws of the Game in 1891 nothing much changed. A lot of these high heid yins ran the line in major competitions and at international matches for a number of years after that.”
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The SFA big wigs were not permitted to referee matches involving their own clubs. However, they would to do so in games involving their rivals. Surely there were some questionable calls which favoured their particular team in those encounters?
“They wouldn’t do that,” said Herbertson. “Their position held sway, their neutrality would be a given. If you were the president of the SFA, people had trust in you to referee or run the line in a game properly. There was an element of common sense. It was the practice in those days. And it was no different in other countries, including down south.”
It is fair to say that things have moved on somewhat since then. Football Refereeing in Scotland outlines just how much in forensic detail. Herbertson knows the development, assessment, training and performances of referees have never been better than they are today.
He pays tribute to the individuals responsible, the likes of George Cumming, Peter Craigmyle, Sir George Graham, Jack Mowat and Ernie Walker, for the stark improvements which have been made and explains what the most significant developments have been.
“Before the Second World War, there was a lot of conflict between the SFA and SFL (Scottish Football League),” he said. “The two bodies were quite often at loggerheads. Refereeing was the vehicle through which quite a lot of football battles were fought in those days.
“The SFRA (Scottish Football Referees’ Association) trained up the referees. The SFA only picked referees for matches for their own cup competitions and district competitions. All other football bodies appointed their own referees.
“Referees were always assessed and categorised, right from the early days. A good number were deleted from the list because they were deemed to be incompetent. Suspensions and deletions were a regular feature back in the early days.
“But the SFA only became the sole appointing body for senior and junior football in 2006. It has been a fantastic thing. They can control, in a way which could not have been done before, the development of referees much better. They only used to make 300 appointments per season, now they do over 10,000.”
So what exactly has altered in refereeing over the decades? “Their professionalism, their overall approach, their fitness,” said Herbertson. “That stems from George Cumming, who was appointed as SFA referee training officer in 1988.
“Refereeing had almost been overlooked up until that point. It was just accepted that referees would come through naturally in the way that players were expected to emerge from the streets. They were being ignored. Suddenly, things changed dramatically because there was a specialist in the field.
“Look at what the referees looked like 40 years ago compared to what they look like now. They are athletes now. I give credit to George Cumming, who was a player himself, an amateur internationalist who also played for St Mirren and Partick Thistle as a professional, for that. He knew good performance was based on good fitness. Without a doubt, it has helped.”
“The SFA is a different animal now to what it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. The breadth of its operations is huge. Referees benefitted from the money coming into the game. The information available and coaching now is far superior to what it was.
“There is a uniformity of how things are handled now more than ever before. A referee was always an individual. He had that get-out clause provided by the Laws of the Game – ‘if in the opinion of the referee’.
“Football has evolved. You get guidance form FIFA and UEFA and you have to follow it. Information has cascaded out. What happens here happens in other countries. You will still get subtle differences on interpretation of offences. But they are much more standard in their approach.
“There will still be grey areas. It always raises an eyebrow when a manager says, ‘Why on earth was my player sent off for that offence?’. That approach is nothing new in football. Referees apply directives to the best of their abilities. Seeing a player getting sent off for an offence shouldn’t be a huge surprise to a manager.”
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Herbertson discovered that outcries about contentious decisions and unhappiness with certain referees are by no means modern phenomena when he was writing his book. He recounts how Kilmarnock submitted diagrams to the SFA which they believed showed why the match official had got several decisions wrong in a game against Beith in the early 1900s. Their appeals fell on deaf ears.
“Clubs have never been slow to complain about a referee,” he said. “They see things through only one eye. Managers were all in favour of VAR when it was being introduced because they saw it from their own advantage. But it works two ways. They don’t like it when a decision goes against them.
“But that is nothing new, referees have been blamed for teams losing games for years. There would often be gaping holes in their argument. A negative outcome is always at the root of it.”
Many fans are deeply suspicious of a referee who was a childhood supporter of a certain club being allowed to take charge of a game involving the side he grew up cheering on from the stands as a boy. But Herbertson has no concerns.
“How do referees get into the game?” he said. “It’s because they like football. They wouldn’t be there otherwise. As I say, they wouldn’t survive if they started to favour a team. They are there to do a job to the best of their ability regardless of which sides they are refereeing on the day. Nobody is harder on themselves than a referee.”
Try telling that to the less savoury element which attaches itself to the game in this country. Football Refereeing in Scotland bemoans the shocking treatment of match officials by yobs in modern times, laments their portrayal as “the root of all evil” in the media and castigates clubs for scapegoating them to deflect attention away from their own failings.
“When emails became a thing the SFA would actually get emails from people complaining about a decision during the course of a match,” he said.
“All joking aside, though, there was a threat that got issued to a referee. It was pursued and the offender dealt with. The police were able to trace him from his email. Thankfully that was a rarity. But there are huge dangers out there with the way things are these days.”
The eejits who contaminate the airwaves with their wild accusations in the wake of Celtic games against Rangers would benefit greatly from getting a hold of a copy of Football Refereeing Scotland: A History of its Organisation and Development. But so would anyone with an interest in the sport on these shores. They would quickly revise their opinion of our much-maligned men-in-the-middle if they did so.
Football Refereeing in Scotland: A History of its Organisation and Development 1873 – 2023 by Drew Herbertson is available to buy on Amazon.
