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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2014

The referee, the moral guardian of the game

Tony Chapron
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

In order to understand what the referee does and the position he occupies in the field of sport, let us start with a question: why did the referee not exist when originally most sports – football especially – were given their rules? The referee does not appear in the initial laws of Football. It may be supposed that originally it had not occurred to the gentlemen of the public schools that players could fail to respect the ethics of the game. And as an admission of failure they rather reluctantly integrated the referee as a guardian of the spirit of the game and its rules (Holt, 1992). Thus, the referee’s emergence was both a phase in the civilising process at work in the 19th century and a symptom - in so far as the participants’ self-control was insufficient to allow the contests to be held peacefully (Elias, 1975). For it is not so much law itself but the relationship to law that is a civilising force. If, as Elias (1975) wrote, "[civilisation] owes its origin and permanence to the intrinsic dynamic of a network of interrelations and specific modifications of forms of behaviour that living together imposes on men", the referee takes part in this dynamic. Like the judge he is the holder of the knowledge of the laws in force; in the eyes of observers he embodies the sport’s Absolute Ethic (Rix et al, 2013). And at the same time, the law guarantees his power and authority. Institutionally, he must watch over the respect of the rules and to do this the institution invests him with the power and duty of judging (Serres, 2010). The referee’s double-faced relationship with the game laws places him at the heart of the diffusion of moral and civilising values. However, although these values are often invoked they are only decreed loosely. During the game, the referee has a definite latitude in setting out what is possible and impossible – thereby constructing an ethic of the game. While the law defines what is permitted and authorised and what is not, the referee, like the judge, orders in the sense that he puts society and social interrelations in order by the authority of the law but based on his active participation in a particular situation. It has to be considered that the ethics of the game, as the referee constructs it, is not independent of his own system of values, or of the sporting culture of which he is the bearer, but it is not independent either of the institutional logic in which he is placed – assessment, hierarchy, promotion/sanction... His spontaneous evaluation of the players’ practices and attitude to how they play, and the way he shows and imposes what is possible are based on his value system and sports culture. But as the institution’s appointee to referee a match at a given competition level, this value system and sports culture implicitly seem to be in conformity with what the sport institutions define as acceptable and what they wish to promote. It is through what the referee shows and imposes not just on the players but also on all the game’s spectators that the institutions are able to make a system of ethics exist. What is at work is the social transposition of bodily practices regulated in the context of the game to the entirety of social practices. To a certain extent the referee becomes the herald of an institutional and state ethic (Chapron, 2006) and takes part as a mandated agent in the ethico-legal control of society, when “the issue is moral discipline of the populations” (Foucault, 1973). Unlike the Greek athlothetes who were responsible for organising and supervising the games, referees are the guarantors of the match’s conformity to the rules but also and just as much of the respect for the moral values the sport inherently and blindly represents (Attali et al., 2002). Not just as observers but as active participants referees are entrusted with a mission to moralise the game’s participants – more by making certain usages standard-practice than by applying the rules in the narrow sense. As the messenger of the legislator the referee is permanently part and parcel of a dynamic on the level of the community and society as a whole. As such he deals directly with behaviour that circumvents the most intrinsic rules and standards. The ways he reacts to and deals with this deviant behaviour form on-the-spot solutions that will become both regulatory and moral precedents and fix – for a time at least – the standard to observe. It might be legitimate to call upon the ethics of the players but the referee’s presence seems to free them of the obligation to respect the sporting Ethic. The invention of the referee allowed them to establish an ethical base they can rest on and refer to which they do not have to support themselves. This explains our initial finding that there was no place for the referee in the original rules for the sports. By establishing the referee as the guardian of the sporting Ethic the players ratified the possibility of dispensing themselves from the game’s moral values. To preserve the ideal of sports ethics they made themselves a moral back-up in the figure of the referee. How, in this light, should the proposal of certain sport institutions to give players and/or managers a right to contest the referee’s decisions – what he shows and imposes on the players - be regarded? Is it contrary to the Absolute Sport Ethic? Does it add to the necessity for the referee to relate the match’s technical ethic constructed in situation to the Sport’s Absolute Ethic and so justify his judgments? Or, on the contrary, does it aim to make players and managers responsible by making their judgments apparent in situation and so the way in which they take part in constructing the ethics of the game? References Attali, M. (2004). Le sport et ses valeurs. Paris: La dispute. Chapron, T. (2005). L’arbitre et ses fonctions éthiques, L’éthique du sport en débat, vol.7 (2). Montréal. Editions Liber. Elias, N. (1975). La dynamique de l’Occident. Paris: Calmann-Lévy Foucault, M. (2013). La société punitive, cours au Collège de France, 1972-1973. Paris: EHESS/Galimard/Seuil. Holt, R. (1992 rééd.). Sport and the British. A modern History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Rix-Lièvre, G., Biache, M-J., Boyer, S., Coutarel, F. (2013). L’arbitre, garant ou acteur de l’éthique sportive ? In Andrieu B., Ethiques du sport (pp.541-551). Paris: Edition L’Age de l’Homme. Serres, M. (2010). Les arbitres ne font pas d’erreur. In Tous arbitres (pp.8-15). Paris: Chronique.

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hal-01120757 , version 1 (26-02-2015)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01120757 , version 1

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Tony Chapron, Géraldine Rix-Lièvre. The referee, the moral guardian of the game. First International Conference on the Science and Practice of Sports Refereeing, Sep 2014, Clermont-Ferrand, France. ⟨hal-01120757⟩

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