Hear stories about Michael Oliver and they appear at odds with the way he is portrayed on the internet.
Not tales about Michael Oliver the referee, but anecdotes about the person – the family man who shares a two-year-old with his partner, Laura, who is there for friends, who is laid-back and loyal.
Take, for example, the time he was invited by Mark Clattenburg to join him and other officials in a pub to watch England vs Iceland at Euro 2016. The tournament had been intense, and they had a three-day break before the quarter-finals.
But Oliver declined, explaining that Martin Atkinson, the head of his refereeing team for the tournament in France, had told them not to leave the hotel. Clattenburg couldn’t believe it.
“You shouldn’t be controlled by this guy,” Clattenburg said. “If you want to go for a beer, go for a beer.” Oliver stayed in his hotel room.
There’s another incident, retold in Clattenburg’s autobiography, Whistle Blower, that offers a glimpse at Oliver’s loyalty. Clattenburg was confined to his home with snappers stationed outside after Chelsea accused of him racially abusing Mikel John Obi during a game – an allegation he was cleared of later.
Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOL), the body in charge of English referees, had told Clattenburg he could skip the fortnightly meeting at St George’s Park. But Clattenburg wanted to go. He was “desperate for a friend”, for a colleague to support him.
And it was Oliver who picked him up in his car, tried to outrun the photographers pursuing them down the A19, weaved in and out of traffic and eventually lost them.
In the most recent explosion of outrage, if you agree that sending off Myles Lewis-Skelly on Saturday was a mistake, then you must also recognise that the abuse and death threats Oliver received are unacceptable. These concepts don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Some of the posts, on social media and in Arsenal fan forums, have been staggering. One fan, posting during the game, said they wanted someone to “bottle” Oliver on his way out of the Emirates Stadium.
Another shares that “if a ref got beaten to an inch of his life one of these days I wouldn’t be against it”. Another post claims to have found Oliver’s home address. Others made threats to his partner and their toddler.
If you add in the context that, as one source told The i Paper, Oliver once had fans turn up at his door and scream abuse through his letterbox, you can see why he might not want to leave it to chance that this is an online-only storm that will never permeate the real world.
If some kind of grip isn’t got on all this, we won’t have any referees left soon. Who in their right mind would go into the profession when this is the response to a perceived mistake? Will officials even make it past the first rungs of the profession?
“We see a spike in reports of abuse at grass-roots level when we see incidents like Arsenal vs Wolves and the response from so-called fans, pundits, and other stakeholders in football,” Martin Cassidy, chief executive of charity Ref Support, tells The i Paper.
“The toxic environments on social media are replicated when there’s young referees out on grass-roots level football, on their own, with no support and no protection from police or stewards. This is part of the problem.”
Even when PGMOL put out a statement revealing there were multiple ongoing police investigations into threats made to Oliver, people accused them of deflecting from the mistake.
Many question how Oliver could be the recipient of abuse when he does not have a known social media account.
The logic of this is absurd. Place yourself in Oliver’s position: you don’t use social media yourself but all of the above is plastered across the internet, in posts viewed millions of times, do you do nothing because nobody @ed you?
The idea that friends and family members didn’t spot this online and raise it with Oliver is nonsensical. As is the idea that you would see posts threatening your family and pertaining to know your address and not escalate it further.
Referees have already seen real-world consequences of viral content fuelling a mob. The video of Jose Mourinho approaching Anthony Taylor in the carpark and calling him a “f***ing disgrace” for his decisions in Roma’s Europa League defeat to Sevilla spread from smartphone to smartphone.
Until Taylor and his family turned up at Budapest Airport for a flight home and were met by hundreds of furious Roma fans, who threw objects at them, and had to be locked in a room by security for their protection.
It feels like we are creeping towards a tragedy, everyone trying to out-do each other, each step of the way normalised.
How does anyone go about stopping the slide?
“I’d love to see the PGMOL take some form of legal action against these social media accounts that are suggesting that PGMOL match officials are corrupt when there’s absolutely no evidence of this,” Cassidy says.
People in refereeing feel that football has always had a sensationalist narrative but that since Elon Musk took over X it has got worse, that it is now open season and that unless somebody does something it won’t stop.
Still, the idea that the body in charge of English referees should lead the charge against threats and abuse online is faintly laughable.
In the meantime, where does it end?
“I genuinely fear this is going to end in the death of a match official unless all stakeholders in the game stand up together and create a cohesive plan to address what has become an abyss of abuse,” Cassidy says.
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