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The English Football Association’s Respect Campaign: the referees’ view

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-12, 12:40 authored by Jamie Cleland, Jimmy O'Gorman, Matthew Bond
Through semi-structured interviews with 11 practising referees registered to one English County Football Association (FA), this article examines their experiences of officiating since the English FA implemented a Respect Campaign in 2008. Despite this high-profile public information campaign focusing on the role of the referee, the results outline that little has changed for those officiating at the youth and adult grassroots level. Referees highlight continuing verbal and physical abuse and argue that County FAs need to demonstrate greater levels of support towards them when dealing with cases of misconduct. Overall, the article illustrates that whilst the Respect Campaign remains a relatively new initiative, it requires further proactive development and improvements due to the unwelcome experiences that remain for referees when officiating matches.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics

Pages

1 - 13

Citation

CLELAND, J., O'GORMAN, J. and BOND, M., 2015. The English Football Association’s Respect Campaign: the referees’ view. International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, 7(4), pp. 551-563.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics on 24th September 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19406940.2015.1088050.

ISSN

1940-6940

eISSN

1940-6959

Language

  • en