It’s a Saturday in January, the snowiest day of the year, and there’s amateur football to be played. My friend Ben and I skid to Seneca College’s campus so that I can watch him referee kids’ soccer games. We are the only car on the highway.

We get to the game just in time, trudge past the groundskeeper fighting a losing battle against the snow, and enter the massive dome that covers the turf field. Balls fly around while coaches, parents, and parent-coaches try to corral their teenagers for the final team talk, their voices increasingly shrill upon seeing the arrival of the ref.

Ben’s been my friend for 15 years and has been refereeing for nearly 12, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him in action. An engineer by day, Ben possesses an annoyingly good memory, a calm head, and a rationalist love of order that would put an enlightenment philosopher to shame. The last few summers, I’ve seen his interest in refereeing sharpen into a passion, mostly expressed through quoting the rule book at me as I complain about a decision given against Arsenal. We went to see the Canada men’s team play in a friendly match this spring. I watched the players; Ben watched the ref.

Like so many of the people I meet during my four months investigating the lives of soccer referees, Ben has ambitions to officiate at the highest level possible and to reach the promised land of professional refereehood.

Achieving that dream, however, is a vanishingly difficult proposition. There are only a handful of Canadian referees who officiate professionally full time, and even fewer who are fully qualified to officiate at a tournament like the World Cup (three Canadians will feature this year). While there are many pathways for a talented Canadian player to become a professional—MLS academies, American universities, leagues like the OPDL, moving to teams in Europe or the U.S.—there is but one for a referee: being assessed by a more senior referee and ascending the ranks within their association. In many ways, it is easier for a very talented player to make it pro than a very talented ref.

This does not curb the ambitions of the striving referees I meet, although it does imbue them, on occasion, with a monk-like vigilance and discipline. The odds of making it are low, and refs don’t want to jeopardize them.

I’ve been observing my friend’s games and speaking to his colleagues at a crucial juncture for football in Canada. As the FIFA World Cup takes over Toronto this month, the local football world is anticipating an increase in investment, infrastructure, and interest at all levels. Football’s already a burgeoning sport in Canada, and a mega-tournament typically brings a surge of growth.

The referees I speak to, however, express a sense of deep foreboding about this prospect. No matter how many people are interested in playing, there exists a critical shortage in the human infrastructure necessary for the game—namely, in the corps of referees, a quirky but indispensable bunch. For football to truly scale along with expectation, new refs in Toronto need to be trained much more quickly. And, crucially, we need to keep the refs we have.

At the referees’ bench that day in January, I’m greeted by Ben’s colleagues. The younger one holds my glance and asks me whether I’m here to assess him. When I say no, he seems disappointed. “I wish that I got assessed more,” Ben chimes in. “It’s a funding issue.”

Referees are apportioned, and paid, along seven ranks of qualification, from children’s games to international professional competition. The system is stratified. Almost everybody wants to progress, and your ability to do so is based largely on the subjective evaluations of your superior. To advance, a referee is assessed according to their deviation from perfection. You never know who may be watching you.

Referees, then, are prone to approach every game with a level of uber-professionalism that is, to put it lightly, wholly incommensurate with the demands of youth and amateur soccer. Their uniforms are impeccable; they wear black shirts, long black stockings, and black boots. They grip highlighter-bright flags checkered orange and yellow. They prance around with purpose. They are trained in how to whistle with maximum authority. If they have hair, it is kempt, though elite referees have a reputation for baldness. “One of my career goals is World Cup 2038,” Ben tells me. “My other career goal is to get to a high enough level where I look around and realize that I just have to shave my head.”

I ask Carlo, an older ref, whether he takes the U14 girls game he’s refereeing that day as seriously as a game in, say, the Ontario Player Development League, an elite youth competition. Carlo bristles. “It’s one game. One game!” he says. “U8 or U21–same laws of the game!”

When I ask him about referees’ labour conditions, he’s blunt. “They’re shit!” he tells me.

In the first game of the day, Ben’s an assistant referee, which means he’s running up and down the sideline as the coach yells at him about offsides, real or imagined. “Fuck my life,” the coach says after one close call, catching my eye with a red and terrible Alex Ferguson-esque scowl. “You’re inconsistent!” he yells, at no ref in particular. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Ben is implacable. After a red card is given to a player in a U-14 girl’s match, a coach insists that the girl be removed from the field entirely (presumably into the snow). Instead of acknowledging the suggestion, Ben performatively focuses on the game: he narrows his eyes, lowers his body and shuffles along the touchline, sniffing for an offside call.

Verbal abuse from players, coaches, and above all, parents, is perhaps the prime issue in referee retention. And it’s an issue that falls along gendered lines. “Year one we lose 42 percent of our male referees and 50 percent of our female referees,” says Barrie. “By year three we have lost 68 percent of male referees and 82 percent of female referees.”

He puts this down to the way officials are treated. Like in many sports, referee-oriented-vituperation is baked into the game at a cultural level. Barrie is a professional referee himself, and has experienced his share. “You know you’re a referee. You expect to be abused,” he says. Ontario Soccer has no real insight into the exact extent of abuse on the field. “We see it, we hear it, we speak to some people, but we certainly don’t have data to support it,” he says.

In 2023, Ontario Soccer piloted a body camera program to deal with the abuse issue. The idea was for the camera to act as “a visual deterrent and data gathering mechanism for disciplinary and research purposes,” according to Barrie. But the cost of the cameras made “scalability impossible” and the program was quickly scrapped.

“They [Ontario Soccer] always forget about referees,” Lawrence Chan tells me. He describes the abuse (including threats of violence) referees receive as almost unbearable, and traces it to a sense of entitlement from parents, who pay exorbitant fees, and consequently coaches who face pressure to win. “Profit, profit, profit,” he says. “When parents are paying such a high fee [for] … their kids to play soccer, they feel like they are a customer. Customer is king, right?”

Abuse is not the only reason referees quit. Two other refs I spoke to, Robertocarlos Quiroz (named after the Brazilian legend) and Tristan Cerkovich, describe the state of refereeing in Toronto as opaque. According to Robertocarlos, an intense, quiet man in his 30s, referees’ status as subcontractors means that they are responsible for accounting for a system that is chaotic at best. Sometimes they’re paid by Ontario Soccer and sometimes by the leagues, sometimes in cash and sometimes electronically. “We have no idea who to contact,” he says. “You would do a whole bunch of games in a month, and then three months later, you get a lump sum payment.”

Tristan and Robertocarlos show me the spreadsheets that they keep to track their payments from different leagues. Both sheets are dotted with yellow and red cells, indicating lost or unmade payments. And when they do get paid, the pay is too low, they say. “‘No ref, no game.’ Then pay me more,” says Robertocarlos. (David Barrie from Ontario Soccer insists that as long as refs invoice correctly they should get paid on time. “There are things that ‘fall through the cracks,’ but overall we are pretty good!”)

For Robertocarlos, though, all this accounting chaos is indicative of a larger pattern of disrespect and disregard for referees that manifests both in a lack of training and a lack of pay. Qualifying as a referee is simple, he says: “Show them that I can do signals and shit, and then they give me a badge.” But staying a referee requires sacrifice, and his priority is the integrity of the sport.

“All of these games are World Cup games for these kids, right?” he says. “This is as far as some of [them] may go. So you have to treat it with some sense of care. I’m here to respect the sport. I’m here to do something for the sport.”