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It’s hard to envy the referees who sign up for a fairly thankless job largely defined by the abuse they’re routinely subjected to on the job. That includes one official who was tasked with overseeing a low-level soccer game in England only to call off the contest at halftime after discovering a bunch of poop in a shoe he’d left in the locker room.
Working as a referee, umpire, or other official tasked with overseeing sporting events is not a job for the faint of heart.
On the best day, you’ll achieve the virtually impossible task of calling a perfect game while receiving close to no recognition from the players, coaches, and fans who essentially expect you to do that every single time, and you head into each game or match knowing they’ll be more than happy to let you know when they think you’ve screwed up.
That backlash is easier to stomach when you get the kind of compensation that comes with being a ref at the highest level of a sport, but you need to be a very special kind of person to tolerate it when you’re working a few hours for a paycheck that will maybe be enough to cover a nice dinner for two.
The average Premier League referee makes £180,000 (~$240,000) per year, and while I can’t find any information concerning the pay of the guys who officiate games in the York Football League—whose highest division sits in the 11th tier of the English soccer system—I’m going to assume it is significantly less than that number.
The stakes may be pretty low at that level, but that doesn’t mean the refs working those games are immune to some wild forms of disrespect.
According to Louis Smith, a consummate Soccer Sicko who devotes a ton of time to filming and covering the action in the York Football League, Old Malton hosted Malt Shovel for a game on Saturday where the visting team had a 2-1 lead heading into halftime only for the game to be abandoned after the referee infromed both squads he was done for the day after finding what appeared to be dog poop smeared on one of his shoes.
It doesn’t appear the culprit has been identified, and it’s pretty easy to understand why the ref went that route.