The issuing of yellow and red cards for offences in football was invented by an English referee called Ken Aston, more than half a century ago.
Aston, from Ilford, London, was in charge of the officials at the 1966 World Cup, during which England’s feisty Wembley quarter-final with Argentina descended into chaos. There was such confusion as to whether German referee Rudolf Kreitlein had sent off Antonio Rattin that Aston had to help persuade the Argentina captain to leave the field.
And after the game England manager Sir Alf Ramsey needed to contact Fifa to clarify whether Jack and Bobby Charlton had been cautioned (Bobby only discovered he had received his only booking in international football 32 years later after asking for confirmation at a Fifa conference).
The whole thing got Aston thinking and, as he stopped at traffic lights on Kensington High Street one day soon afterwards, the solution shone brightly in his face: why not have yellow cards as a warning and red to stop a player’s game completely.
The concept was trialled at the 1970 Mexico World Cup, then introduced into European club football. Five years later, red cards were dropped by the English Football Association, who felt that “demonstrative referees” brandishing them were causing problems. But by the late 1980s football’s lawmakers insisted that English football should readopt them.
Nowadays, an administration fee is attached to the brandishing of cards, whether it is Cristiano Ronaldo being booked for Manchester United or a child playing amateur football: £12 for a yellow card, £35 for two yellows resulting in a sending off, and £45 for a straight red card.
And it turns out that this is quite the money-maker for the 51 County FAs which govern grassroots football. Examining their most recent accounts and annual reports – this is no exact science, trying to track them down is a pursuit full of broken URLs and dead ends – produces some astonishing results.
At an estimate – and the available information is so inconsistent it’s only possible to estimate – County FAs are generating around £8million per year from fining amateur young boys and girls, and adults. The FA did not dispute this figure when I put it to them. And, quite frankly, the exact figure could be far greater.
The Birmingham FA’s audited accounts for 2019/20 reveal that it made £302,852 from fines and appeals in the financial year ending 30 June 2019, and £194,786 to the year ending 30 June 2020.
The Surrey FA received £205,542 from disciplinary costs and fees in 2019, and £137,883 the year before. The income has dropped due to football being severely disrupted by Covid-19.
At some, the figures are less clear: in the 2019/20 Essex FA annual report, for example, it is revealed that 13,103 cautions were handed out during the season, with no financial figure attached. At an entirely conservative estimate that all 13,103 cautions were single yellows, that means amateur players were charged £157,236.
Take a moment to let it sink in that £8m is charged to young girls and boys and amateur adults. Why are the FA fining children, anyway? And why does processing a booking in amateur football still come with a cost? You can understand the administrative costs of sending letters and updating databases in the 1980s, but it’s hard to see how inputting the information into an online system nowadays costs anywhere near £12 for a yellow, let alone nearly 50-quid for a red.
Much of the fees will relate to adult amateurs (even then, £45 will be an awful lot to someone on minimum wage supporting a family who happens to get a little carried away on a Sunday). But much will derive from teenagers and children. And the FA don’t seem to want you to know how much that is.
These clubs are non-profit organisations, run by unpaid volunteers. Lee Warren was one of them until recently, when he stepped down as Brentwood Youth AFC’s secretary to challenge the system.
It costs £175 to play for one of Brentwood Youth’s teams. But if a youth player is shown a straight red card, that will be another 30 per cent for the FA’s coffers.
Warren, 52, has been asking questions for several years now. He is a qualified referee, and tried to get refs to wear body cams so that decisions could be investigated afterwards, but the idea was rejected.
In 2019, Warren wrote to the Essex FA asking for a breakdown of how much money they made from cautioning children. “A lot of their revenue is made up of disciplinary fines,” he tells me.
Many working – for free – in amateur youth football believe cautions should be scrapped altogether.
Repeated requests were refused, but when pushed they agreed to a meeting between Essex FA chief executive Brendan Walshe and the FA’s then head of judicial services, Mark Ives.
They were so jumpy about what releasing those figures might reveal that they told Warren he could see the numbers only after signing a non-disclosure agreement. Nuts, right?
An FA spokesperson told i: “County FAs, like The FA, are not-for-profit organisations and all money generated through any disciplinary sanctions is reinvested back into football in their local communities.
“Fines are just one aspect of our holistic approach to encourage all participants to play football in line with the rules and regulations, and they are proportionate in order to discourage any misconduct and facilitate administration effectively.”
They may be non-profit organisations, but they employ executives earning hundreds of thousands in wages. It sounds an awful lot like that is being propped up by admin fees and fines for cautioning young amateur footballers – but if you want to find out the truth, you’ll probably need to sign an NDA.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3cF5fRG
Post a Comment