For the Fan
The referee made a call you disagree with.
Or a series of calls. Or a pattern of calls that suggests something — incompetence, bias, something — that explains why your team is being disadvantaged. The certainty of your analysis from the stands is remarkable given that you are thirty rows up with no access to the replay and no training in officiating at this level.
The fan’s relationship with referees is one of the most revealing things in sports.
Read this passage slowly.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged.
Matthew 7:1–2 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Do not judge. The instruction is not about having no opinions about decisions that affect outcomes you care about. It is about the posture of the person rendering the verdict — the certainty, the speed, the investment in a specific conclusion before the evidence is actually in.
The fan’s referee anger is interesting because it is anger at authority from a position of complete safety. There are no consequences for being wrong about the call from the stands. No one will correct the fan who loudly declares the referee to be incompetent and then is proven wrong by the replay. The distance produces a freedom of judgment that the fan would not exercise if the accountability were real.
This is worth examining because the same dynamic can operate in other parts of life. The confident assessment of someone else’s decision from a position where you bear none of the consequences or complexity of making it. The certainty about what should have been done from the vantage point of someone who doesn’t have to do it. The referee is a low-stakes practice context for a tendency that shows up at higher stakes elsewhere.
The call may well have been wrong. Officials make mistakes. The more interesting question is what your response to the wrong call reveals about your relationship with authority, fairness, and the limits of your own perspective from a distance.
The referee is a low-stakes practice context for a tendency that shows up at higher stakes elsewhere: confident judgment from a position where you bear none of the consequences.
When you are most certain the referee is wrong, how much of that certainty is based on what you actually saw and how much is based on what you wanted the outcome to be?
The honest answer to this requires genuine self-reflection. Give it time.
The call may have been wrong. Your response to it reveals something more interesting than the call itself.
Personal reflection. No group setting required.