You have your way. I have my way. Does the correct way exist?

by Amy Eustace

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Joey Barton, be it criminal or sporting, always seems to have his horns locked with authority over some issue or another. In the past two years, he has managed to perform an impressive image upheaval, largely through the power of social networking, and has gone from jailbird to avid Tweeter and football philosopher. But neither the Friedrich Nietzsche quotes nor the magic of fatherhood has made him a stranger to controversy, and his literal tête-à-tête with Bradley Johnson during QPR v Norwich last week saw him become the nucleus of a rather interesting debate on refereeing, reputation and the FA’s incredibly skewed disciplinary record.

An overview of the argument which sparked the discussion goes something like this: Barton, as he is wont to do, became involved in a heated dispute with Norwich’s Bradley Johnson in QPR’s clash with the Canaries at Loftus Road. Barton squared up to Johnson, who instantly turned away after minimal contact, rubbing his head, suggesting he had been headbutted. Referee Neil Swarbrick sent Barton for an early shower. Barton took out his anger on Twitter. Johnson took a photo of himself with sign that read, “Barton your breath stinks”. It was all jolly good fun. The overriding feeling on second viewing of the incident – where Barton barely grazes the QPR midfielder’s forehead – was that the FA would surely rescind his red card and overturn his three-match ban without any fuss. Right?

But ‘no fuss’ and ‘the FA’ aren’t really prone to cohabitation and nor, for that matter, does the Scouse scoundrel in question take a laidback stance towards his own vigilantism.  Over the following few days, Barton remonstrated with his Twitter followers on the issue of play-acting – rather short-sightedly, given his theatrical display against Arsenal at the start of the season, when his spectacular collapse saw Gervinho’s slap receive the exact same punishment. Or, his Twitter defence of the decision that saw Ivan Klasnic sent off for a rather tame headbutt on Norwich’s Marc Tierney, whose reaction was fairly overextravagant, claiming that you have to go down to get the decision. Nonetheless, Barton was none too complimentary of Johnson’s behaviour on this occasion, claiming that the referee had been ‘conned’ and that ‘the best thespian wins’.  He questioned whether players could sue referees, or even the actors themselves. QPR appealed the ban, but the FA weren’t swayed. Their statement on the matter on Wednesday read as follows:

“An Independent Regulatory Commission has today dismissed a claim of wrongful dismissal from Queens Park Rangers midfielder Joey Barton following his red card for violent conduct in the QPR vs Norwich City game on 2 January 2012.

Barton will serve a three-match suspension with immediate effect.”

Granted, Barton’s actions can be described as ‘violent conduct’, and Gervinho’s appeal was given the same treatment by the FA. But the harshness of Barton’s dismissal is set against a backdrop of increasingly regular referee mistakes, and at a time when the FA are in the limelight more than ever. The Luis Suarez race row, one that has disintegrated into an issue of tribalism and stubbornness, was – despite the failings of Suarez and Liverpool Football Club – poorly handled by the FA, who did little to enhance the objectivity of the judgment by ensuring true independence in their ‘independent panel’ (for more, see Stuart Gilhooly’s article on the topic). Coupled with the recent absurd sending offs of Wigan’s Conor Sammon (thankfully, subsequently overturned) and Wolves’ Nenad Milijas (unfortunately, upheld), refereeing mistakes and the FA’s refusal to correct or punish them have subsumed results themselves. In Wolves’ case, Mick McCarthy’s pre-Chelsea press conference and PowerPoint presentation stressed this issue, and it didn’t exactly help matters that Frank Lampard’s dodgy late lunge on Adam Hammill in the game that ensued only earned him a yellow card. In Fulham’s home game v Liverpool, Clint Dempsey escaped scot-free for a display of aggression like the one that saw Barton sidelined – instead, the focus of his anger, Craig Bellamy, was shown a yellow.

Refereeing consistency, these days, is almost non-existent. The laws of the game are applied unevenly, and in a quest to eliminate the human error that tilts the playing field in a vast number of games, supporters calling for video and goal-line technology have come up against the impassable figures of football bureaucrats like the universally hated Sepp Blatter, and the slightly less despised Michel Platini. Blatter’s stance on the matter has softened a great deal, with the FIFA boss even suggesting that technology may be ready in time for the 2014 World Cup, while UEFA’s Platini stands by his two extra goal line referees, who have yet to make any sizeable contribution to the interests of fairness and accuracy. Still, the mission to improve the quality of refereeing decisions has been a slow, unfulfilling process to date.

What is noticeable is that, while referees maintain an air of complete objectivity and emotional detachment, reputation influences decisions more than it should. Barton may have toned down his off-pitch escapades, but on the pitch his bad boy history precedes him, and who would blame anyone for believing someone less tarred by past incidents over the Scouser? Nenad Milijas’ Wolves team have been lumped in with Stoke as the Premier League’s aggressive, foul-happy side, guilty in the past of less than perfect challenges, so who’s to blame Stuart Atwell if he occasionally subconsciously judges players by the gung-ho style of their particular team? And who’s going to believe Craig Bellamy over Clint Dempsey, when one swung a golf club at their own teammate a few years back and the other didn’t? The opposite goes for Lampard, and all the other players who get away with absurdly dangerous tackles because, supposedly, football deities reckon ‘they’re not that type of player’. It’s hard to blame referees, however. We all pander to these kind of stereotypes, and, not that we know what goes through an official’s mind in the split second he (or she) makes a decision, but it’s not out of the realms of imagination to think that reputation can become a piece of the puzzle when a referee isn’t all that sure of what happened. In these instances, the losers tend to be those who have found themselves on the naughty step before. It’s important that referees judge the incident and not the player, but that’s not always so simple.

We’ve all, whether we like it or not, come to accept that to a certain extent, refereeing discrepancies and inconsistencies are part of the game- at least until the powers that be embrace the kind of technology that makes anybody watching at home more clued up than the men of the pitch. Blogs have sprung up around the inevitable ‘what if’ that surrounds poor referee calls, and on this front Debatable Decisions leads the way. What we still don’t expect, however, is for the FA to turn around and defend these mistakes. If you’ve not seen John Sinnott’s piece on the BBC, you should make it your business to give it a read, because it paints the FA’s track record on disciplinary matters in a very unfavourable light.

The Independent Regulatory Commission heard 473 cases in the last year, and 99.5% (all but two) ended in a guilty verdict. None of the 99.5% were overturned on appeal: a startling rate of conviction for any judgment-making body. For the FA, the success rate for the charges they put to the Commission is seen as a victory, but the FA decide what cases go to the Commission, and they decide all punishments and decisions up to that point too. What is becoming increasingly evident, particularly in light of the Suarez decision in which the FA hand-picked a three man panel to adjudicate on the matter, is that they are judge, jury and prosecutioner in all of the cases they investigate, while, at the same time, hardly acting as models of good litigation by appealing international sanctions such as Wayne Rooney’s ban for kicking an opponent (an action in which they succeeded in having Rooney’s ban reduced).  Anybody who has ever taken a single legal class can stress the value of the ‘separation of powers’ doctrine, prohibiting the State from controlling the judiciary, and vice versa. The reasoning is that each branch of power acts as a check on the other. But bad practice goes all the way to the very top in football. In UEFA, the same shortage of true independence exists, FIFA has developed a disastrous relationship with corruption, and even CAS adjudicators are linked to federations. Justice in football is as elusive as good governance, and the two are inextricably tied together.

The FA described comparisons between sporting law and public law as ‘unfortunate’, and it’s true that sporting incidents are incredibly different to civil and criminal disputes, despite some overlap. But how can they expect to escape examination when they leave themselves vulnerable to questioning by conducting flawed investigations? The Suarez ruling, though fundamentally solid, was fraught with deficiencies on closer inspection. Putting aside the nuances of the racism row, it doesn’t make you an advocate of what Suarez did or didn’t do to expose the flaws in the FA’s system, and suggest that it requires urgent review.

What’s abundantly clear is that players and clubs are given conflicting messages on right and wrong thanks to inconsistency on the part of referees, and the FA lack complete clarity and transparency in their management of the aftermath. When the burden of proof seems to rest entirely on the accused rather than the accuser, methods must be questioned, and indeed when 115 page documents such as the Suarez judgment are the exception rather the rule, you have to wonder why the reasoning for many charges aren’t so carefully publicised.

Barton may not have any right to self-righteousness over play-acting, referee-fooling and general saintliness, but he has a point all the same. His ban stands as evidence of a bumbling FA whose methodology is known only to itself. As Barton’s good friend Moz once crooned, “I’ve changed my plea to guilty, because freedom is lost on me. See how your rules spoil the game.”