Anthony Taylor talks retirement, career & scrutiny

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. If you are currently overpaying on software to run your business, remember this number, 10 ,000. That's the number of new businesses that join Odoo per month.

0:42Join Odoo today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

0:50This is the Football Daily Podcast on BBC Sounds. Hello, Football Daily listeners. Dan Rowan here. I've been speaking to former top Premier League referee Anthony Taylor in his first interview since announcing his retirement. He ended his 20-year career after taking charge of Spain's last 16 win over Portugal in the World Cup, having also officiated 668 professional domestic matches. This is the Football Daily Podcast from Five Live Sports. Anthony, thanks ever so much for your time. Good to see you. You too. How does it feel? Here we are at the start of a new season. for years you'll have been getting ready to officiate again, this time you're not.

1:31Is that a strange sensation? Most definitely it's a strange sensation. Obviously pre-season has always been a real tough part of the season, getting prepared for the new season, getting yourself physically and mentally prepared. So in a way it's a nice change that I don't have to do as much training as I used to. but also there's a hint of sadness as well because for sure that's part of a big part of my life that I'm going to miss being involved in and miss being out on the field at the start of the season so yeah, bittersweet moment really. Have you had any second thoughts? Any regrets about retirement?

2:07No, no I haven't. I think the thing that was important to me was I wanted to decide when I finished on my own terms and to make sure that when I did finish it was a moment I felt that was right and making sure that I finished at the very top and I don't think you can say there's any better place to finish than at a World Cup. When you reflect on your long career with the whistle what are you most proud of? I think sometimes people try and judge how good a referee is either by a perception that they've never seen or heard and also sometimes by the major finals that they're entrusted to referee.

2:54And of course, both of those metrics are good measures sometimes. Personally, I always think a measure of a good top-level official is the longevity, the consistency performing at that level and how resilient you can be. so combining that longevity and resilience you can argue is what makes a world class elite official so they're really two important things for me that can be worked on, can be nurtured and are really good measures of judging what top class officials are really about Can you be specific about particular special memories that you will treasure? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really a struggle to put one match or one final or one tournament above the other.

3:44For example, how do you place refereeing your first FA Cup final above being at a World Cup? Or how do you put a Euro quarterfinal above a really high-profile Premier League game? All of those incidents are moments that most referees can only ever dream about being involved in. And so there's so many special memories over the past 16 years in Elite. in elite football that I think it's really really difficult to say that is one specific moment that that I would really treasure because I actually treasure all the moments, all the memories, all the matches, all the people I've worked with over the years and that's what I will always think about.

4:25Any regrets or things that you didn't have the chance to do that you would have loved to have done? Yeah for sure there's one moment that stands out and you know I will always regret not being able to referee of Champions League final. When you're at the top level of the game there are so many things that are out of your control so your sole focus is about developing yourself as a person and yourself as an on-field performance. A Champions League final is the dream of most referees let alone most top-level officials but of course things are out of your control so since 2017 there's something like five out of the last seven champions league finals have had english teams so my big regret was probably in 2024 when that was probably my moment to put myself right at the front of the the queue to referee the champions league final and unfortunately that particular season for me was just too erratic in terms of performance so you know going through the season you'd expect a referee who's in line for a final to be consistent across the board and from week to week I will be having an excellent performance then a not so good performance and it would kind of yo-yo like this through the season and this is the kind of crazy world football throws up the end of that season when I helped to do the final I actually refereed a semi-final Dortmund PSG and personally at the time I viewed that as a failure now to for most people to say doing a Champions League semi-final as a failure is quite a mental concept really so that's probably my only regret but like I say sometimes you don't always achieve what you want to sometimes because of you needed to have done better and sometimes things are out of your control.

6:18And how has the reaction, the response been from the game and how much has it meant to you? Seriously I've been overwhelmed by the response. Of course referees are normally figures of hate within the game for usually unjustifiable reasons when they're subject to conspiracy theories or bias of fans and clubs. But honestly the number of messages I've received from around the world not only the refereeing community, from the wider community in general. Players have made contact with me, club officials have made contact with me. And so it's been really, really overwhelming and quite touching the levels of support and kind messages that I've received.

7:01You said at the time that it was the right time to step aside and look forward to transitioning to the next chapter of my career. What do you want to do now? You're still a relatively young guy. What do you want to do for the years ahead? I have a real passion for helping and supporting people maximising potential, that's where my passion lies. Moving forward I really hope to be able to pass on my knowledge and experience to officials from all levels to develop and to help them achieve their goals, because that's what really kind of makes me tick. How do your family feel about you retiring from elite refereeing are they pleased are they relieved and have you done it for them to a certain extent?

7:50So I think when you are weighing up the decision whether you're going to finish on field or not undoubtedly one of the things that you are considering are the serious sacrifices that both your family and your friends have made over the years for you to do what you do. And of course, this is the same for top-level players, top-level managers. Their personal life and family life takes a back seat for a huge number of years. And so for sure, that was a big part of why I decided to step back from on-field officiating. I've also mentioned before about the scrutiny and the demands placed on referees at the very top level.

8:36And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're struggling to cope with those demands, but it comes to a point where it feels that your body and your mind needs to take a break from those kind of pressures. So even if transitioning into a different role quickly after stepping away from on-field, that doesn't necessarily mean you're not coping with the scrutiny and the pressure, it just feels at that moment in time your body and your mind needs a different challenge a different moment to reset and look forward as a perfectly natural progression on your career Talking of using your experience to help officiating you've obviously been appointed as Director of Elite Refereeing for the Turkish Football Federation can you explain what that role will involve?

9:26So basically the role in a nutshell is about improving standards for the top level group of officials in Turkey, along with helping them develop their talent ID programme and also helping their international referees improve, get better, more high profile appointments, which is something that excites me because, as I said to you, I really enjoy working with people, trying to help them improve, get better, understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and then hopefully seeing the results of that at the end of it. And how did that come about, that opportunity? It came up very quickly with the help of UEFA, and so UEFA facilitated the discussion and things developed from there.

10:17Anthony, clearly refereeing in Turkey has gone through a turbulent period after the betting scandal of last year. How, from what you gather, do the authorities intend to go forward from here with your help? Yeah, so the main focus with the working together with the president and the chairman of the federation is to focus on helping the officials, particularly the younger officials in the group, develop, build that resilience, build a better skill set to cope in those demanding matches. and really to drive improvement of standards in that respect and that's the central aim of my role there. And finally, how much time do you anticipate spending there and from when you've gone, how different is the footballing culture to what you're familiar with here or do you get a sense of it from your travels through UEFA?

11:07Football in Turkey is immensely passionate, really, really passionate, really committed. Even more so than here? Yeah, for sure. the atmosphere in the stadium is absolutely unbelievable and so that can be that can present its own challenges to the to the referees in understanding that environment how they control their emotions how they make decisions under pressure in those environments that's how we can develop the skill set of all the referees there to help them navigate those challenges better yeah and do you feel quite honoured and flattered to be the man that they've come to for help? Yeah again I'm very privileged that people hold my experience and knowledge in such high regard that they think I can make such a positive impact so like I say I'm really looking forward to working with the President and the Federation in Turkey to make a real positive impact on the standards over there.

12:02If we may let's turn to the decision you've made to retire I think when we spoke a year ago or so you hinted at the fact that you've been doing it a long time and you were starting to think about the future but was there a moment when you said I've reached the end I want to step back now from what I've been doing? I think in your mind you always have a rough plan of a rough timeline of how things might shape however as you know from when we've spoken before refereeing an international tournament again there's so many things out of your control you don't know how many matches you're going to do you have no idea which matches you'll do you don't even know whether you're going to perform well so to do three matches the third one being such a high profile match with Spain Portugal's knockout match which is always a an extra layer of challenge and then of course with the potential to have gone further in the competition based on our performances which was only scuppered by the progress of both our national team and Argentina then I only really decided properly once our tournament came to the end in America because I think it was really important to go into such a competition fully focused and trying to do our very best to do as many matches as possible to the very best of our ability and only then when you know that you were coming home was the serious consideration and talking started about what I planned to do when I got home.

13:32But you went into the tournament open to the idea of carrying on in the Premier League, for example. You hadn't said this is my last job as it were to yourself. No, like I said, I had not made my mind up for sure going into that tournament. So I think to make a reasoned and balanced decision, you have to complete the Premier League season and complete what your tasks were doing at the World Cup first before you decide anything because otherwise it will distract from or could distract from the job at hand in America. And obviously up until the very end England and Argentina were involved in the tournament how frustrating is I mean I guess you know the rules but let's say England had been knocked out in the quarter finals how realistic was the prospect do you think of getting the final and how frustrating is it that Argentina's progress prevented that from happening?

14:24Yeah, so I mean, it's frustrating from the point of view that it's two World Cups in a row that it's happened to us. But then equally, we knew the situation because FIFA were very upfront with us about the scenarios. So we knew that if England or Argentina progressed to a certain level, then it prevents us from doing anything else.

15:21We'll see you next time. so you can pack lunch boxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

15:51This is... Settle down, Tuffer. Sorry. Cricket on Five Live Sport. Oh, I've living every ball of this. Listen on BBC Sounds.

16:10You said in your announcement, officiating at the elite level has been an immense privilege, but the pressure is intense and the scrutiny is constant. How big a factor was that pressure and scrutiny in your decision? It's part of it. It's part of it. So any referee would be lying to you if they said that pressure or that scrutiny did not bother them. Because that's a natural human reaction. One of the challenges that referees face at every level, whether that be at the very top level or whether they're refereeing at grassroots, is actually understanding the challenges that we face. So fear, fear of making mistakes, external opinion, spectators, managers, parents, media, colleagues, you know, all these things feed into creating self-doubt, lacking confidence, and then things can spiral out of control and you lose the ability to actually have any confidence in what you're doing on the field.

17:14So, one of the key things that I said before was about resilience and building that level of resilience and finding your own solutions, what works for you. I felt that I've been very good over the number of years, finding my own solutions, how I cope with those challenges. How do I fight with the fear of making a mistake? How do I fight with the fear of not being selected for a major tournament? Because, being honest, that's viewed as a failure by most people. if you're in the running for a tournament and you're not selected for a tournament how do you fight the fear of not being appointed to high profile Premier League games when you're classed as an elite official and this can be a real struggle for people to deal with Was it a struggle for you to deal with?

18:00It can be everybody hits these difficult times we all have periods in our career like a player where you lack confidence where a player is unable to score goals or make a complete number of passes. Referees are exactly the same. You're out of sync, you're out of position, you don't quite click with the way you manage players. You make some mistakes. But referees know that. Referees know that. And the scrutiny that comes with that nowadays is off the scale. And I hear sometimes people in the media will say, well, referees are trying to be the centre of attention. Well, they're not. They're an integral part of the game, but a lot of the scrutiny that's brought on referees is people in the media looking for things to scrutinise, whether that be fairly or unfairly.

18:53And so it's a big snowball effect. Does that include former officials? Absolutely. Does that disappoint you? Yes, it does personally, yeah. Yeah, because it doesn't have any balance to it a lot of the time. And why didn't they do that when they've been in those shoes as an official, some of them? Not all of them, but some of them. Yeah, so some of them, it's just part of the focus that comes with football. Football is a very opinionated sport, so of course, everybody's entitled to their opinion. You know, many things in football split rooms, split opinions in the pubs, in people's houses. But when we're dealing with supposedly objective analysis of matches, whether that be an expert ex-player in a studio or an ex-referee somewhere else that level of analysis should be balanced and fair have you ever felt the need or have you contacted a former official who has given an opinion that you think is unfair you've just let it go yeah not at all because actually when you start exploring about how people feel and what does a high performance environment, high performance culture actually mean?

20:10High performance environments involve creating a feeling of positivity where people can learn and people can be open about how they feel but if it's all one-sided criticism then that creates a culture of fear, disrespect, shame. So what you're saying I think is Anthony is that there's a lot of negative opinion but they don't often credit when some good work's being done there needs to be more of that Absolutely but again these are challenges that face performers in all aspects of elite sport right people don't want to make mistakes people are judged and they're embarrassed and they feel shame when they feel like they're being criticised all the time and that criticism can be counterproductive sometimes What was your method of having the resilience that you've spoken about during your long career of dealing with the inevitable expectation, scrutiny, pressure that you were inevitably under?

21:11My personal approach to it is how do you balance off creating a sense of invincibility against an environment where you can be vulnerable and honest and actually be honest with somebody and learn from your mistakes. so again if we're talking about high performance high performance only really exists if vulnerability is allowed to to come to the fore if you can actually say yeah i've made a mistake but let's try and understand why i've done that mistake how i'm feeling and what i can do next time to avoid making that mistake again that's the that's the true meaning of of high performance my personal approach to it is of course you've got to try and feel confident going into a high profile game that you are going to manage it with robust confidence dealing with difficult players or difficult decisions but then that's also got to be tempered with well perfection doesn't exist and anybody who thinks perfection does exist is living on a different different planet so that's the balance I've always tried to achieve.

22:18Last season going into the World Cup how did you find the level of scrutiny on you specifically I know you don't look at social media to avoid that side of things how does it present itself then if you're sort of shutting yourself away from the criticism that would happen online where do you feel it the abuse the expectation the scrutiny how does it present itself in real life? Yeah in real life a lot of scrutiny is from our own performance analysis which of course needs to happen because that's the only way you can improve and get better but even away from social media the general coverage of football these days is 24-7 so there's a lot more there's a lot more mediums for you to discover what people think about what happened last weekend and I might add it's not always negative feedback when you come across fans and people when you're travelling around the country but it is like you are living in a goldfish bowl for 10 months of the year because of the focus that is on Premier League and international football and has that got more intense with the advent of dedicated shows that discuss refereeing decisions for example there is such a focus now on that part of the game do you feel it's thought more intense because there's a thirst for there's a thirst for people to be told is the decision right or wrong and the reality in football is there's a lot of subjectivity and opinion in the middle of right and wrong

24:02but that's not acceptable a lot of the time now there's a like I say there's that people want to no, is that decision right, is it wrong? Where in reality you don't really get universal agreement on those things a lot of the time. How would you describe the culture within this sport, within football right now when it comes to the treatment of match officials? It can be very up and down.

24:34One could describe it as toxic to a degree. but that level of toxicity is to do with people performing and people being selected so it's not just specific to referees I don't think and we have to be honest about that that's the nature of elite sport people want to win

25:00but people should want to win through the right decisions and hard work and fairness. Wanting to win at all costs shouldn't really come into it if it's creating an environment where the participants, players and match officials are unfairly treated and criticised at times. Do you feel there needs to be something of a honest and open debate about the state? that we've reached if we are to prevent match officials not wanting to continue or we've seen managers actually resign over it because they don't want to deal with the abuse they've received, we know about the online harms issue when it comes to social media, do you think that, do you sense we've reached a bit of a tipping point and the game needs to have a sort of honest and open debate about that with a view to improving?

25:59I think there has to be an appetite for change. There's been lots of measures in recent years to try and improve behaviour of players on field, which has seen in the last two or three seasons, has seen a marked improvement in terms of the surrounding of referees on the field. and that's a combination of the measures that authorities put in place but also how referees were implementing it and also how players reacted and considered how they were behaving on the field. But then if we take it further down the pyramid to grassroots where every player and every referee starts, we still have a big cultural problem in this country where grown adults think it is perfectly acceptable to verbally abuse referees or players under the age of 16 on a parks pitch.

26:57And how would you describe that situation? Well, it's crazy. And what's driving that? Is that because there's a poor example being set at the top of the game or is it more because people just use it to vent for a straight... I sometimes struggle to accept the analogy that what they see at the top level is always replicated at grassroots. That point is true to a degree. but I can't accept and you're a parent you don't necessarily go and watch your kids play football on a Sunday morning and suddenly think oh this is a great idea to start verbally abusing one of the opposition players or the young kid who's trying to referee, trying to learn life skills exactly the same as a player and you know we have coaches of teams who have exactly the same approach so it's not necessarily what behaviour is copied it does come down to personal responsibility a lot of the time as well and before we move on Anthony just how would you describe the impact this side of the game this darker side of officiating has had on you personally has it taken a toll do you think on you and is it something which you will need to sort of have time to sort of recover from or will you always sort of be a little bit guarded in public in case someone recognises you and takes issue with you even in the years to come?

28:14I don't think it's had a major impact on me I think what it's done over the years it's significantly raised my own awareness of how important it is to try and understand people and how we understand emotion and how we use that in trying to foster elite performance and so I always find it important now to try and share my opinions on these kind of areas and being honest there's not many people who probably share my opinions on this, not many people who are either willing to consider what's being said and actually be honest enough with themselves to be in touch with how they're actually feeling.

28:58Why are you speaking out in such a way because it would be easier to just move on and not address it, do you feel that you owe a responsibility to those that come in your footsteps and who have looked up to you? Absolutely, you know mental health in a wider societal context is a real topical issue for everybody. And there's a real stigma for if somebody speaks out that they're either not feeling particularly good this week or they're not feeling as good as they normally would do, then there's that sense of fear around of all of that. Well, this person's not going to be any use to me for the next few weeks just because somebody's being honest about how they feel?

29:40Just on the World Cup I was struck by the extent to which there seemed to be more conspiracy theories put out there on social media than ever before there was obviously a lot of rancour around that Egypt-Argentina game where I think the Egyptian federation made clear their anger at that and called for an investigation, called for the referee I think the French referee Francois Letizier you may know and he was very much pinpointed and blamed for that, there were allegations of favouritism, does that sadden you that the integrity of referees were called into question by an actual football association and what damage does that potentially do given what you've been describing?

30:20It always saddens me when someone's integrity is questioned and they receive threats like in that situation you've just mentioned. It's never really discussed the result of a football matches multifaceted of course referee decisions are part of that but we have players who have a low passing accuracy we have players who miss penalties we have coaches who maybe make the wrong tactical changes or the wrong team selection so there's a there's a huge range of factors that that play into a result of the game so i think it's probably important that people just need to remember remember that it was an unprecedented world cup in a number of ways obviously the biggest, the longest, hottest on occasions but also there were lots of new law changes I think FIFA introduced 11 different measures for this tournament, some designed to speed up matches, reduce the potential for match impacting mistakes, how did you find the challenge of having those changes and presiding over them?

31:19Yeah I think because we still had plenty of time when we arrived in America pre-tournament to really discuss and work out how we're going to implement those changes, particularly the ones that were designed to keep in the intensity and the speed of the game and trying to reduce the delays. Is it hard though? You find yourself counting all the time? And also in a tournament, it's a good setting to implement changes like that because it's different to a domestic season. You've got a smaller number of games. you can try and achieve a real degree of consistency of how you're going to implement the counting and of course we need to remember the actual aim is for the referees on field to try and prevent these problems happening before you need to implement these changes so a lot of work and everybody was trying to work out their own solutions how can I stop these problems happening before I need to reverse a throwing or give a corner against the goalkeeper, situations like that and so you know there's only a couple of occasions from memory across the whole tournament where they were actually penalised and that's down to a lot of the proactive work that the match officials did to try and stop these issues happening.

32:43And four new areas were covered by VAR so it was expanding in terms of its remit I guess, how did you how did you feel about that? I mean anything to do with VAR is good when we're talking about increasing the overall accuracy of decision making but we also need to remember that VAR is there to create a sense of justice so the real big errors the big clear errors it's not there for microscopic long detailed checks. That's probably where everybody's trying to work even harder to get to, particularly this new coming season. Also, people need to remember what they ask for with VAR. Sometimes what people are asking for doesn't always, and I'm talking about the wider football context, doesn't always marry up.

33:37So in one sense, we want correct decisions, but on the other side we want consistency and speed and common sense and sometimes those those things don't link together. How far away is the game from getting it right? I think if we continue to focus on not being microscopic and not being too long in checking situations where we're only using really clear evidence of an ever being made then yeah I think people will start to accept and trust the process more. That final game of yours that you officiated did you that's a big game like Spain-Portugal obviously you know huge pressure massive occasion knockout game how did you enjoy that experience the build-up to it and the responsibility or were you kind of worried about and nervous and tense ahead of that game?

34:39No, I mean personally those higher profile games I enjoy even more, it's almost like a nervous energy that makes you more focused, more determined because you're desperate not to make a mistake in those matches. And of course I knew a lot of the players in that game anyway, refereed them many times, they know me. And so sometimes you have to try and use that to your advantage, even in those big knockout games where familiarity and friendliness can go out the window, particularly when players from club teams are playing against each other. But certainly those kind of matches are so amazing to be involved in.