I sponsor the SCO. I have a box. I go to almost every home game and a few away ones.
After years in the stands, I thought I had a reasonable grasp of football. The game, the calls, the bad decisions. I had opinions like everyone else. Loud ones, sometimes.
Then a few weeks ago I spent an evening listening to a Ligue 1 referee talk about his actual job, and I realized I had understood almost nothing.
300 decisions. Per match.
Pierre Chevreux. 13 years as a professional assistant referee in Ligue 1. Today he runs a cafe in Angers.
The Dalle Angevine organized a roundtable with him, Rodolphe from the Ducs d’Angers, and Vincent Manceau, who knows what the same situations look like from the other side of the pitch. I was there mostly out of curiosity.
300 decisions per match. That’s what Pierre opened with.
One every 18 seconds. On average. Some clusters of ten decisions in less than a minute. With incomplete information, under physical pressure, in front of crowds that have already formed an opinion before you’ve even moved.
No pause. No rewind. No committee.
He described a Bordeaux-PSG. The goalkeeper picks up a backpass because Ibrahimovic is charging. Obvious foul. Pierre sees it clearly from his position on the line, signals it. The central referee doesn’t follow. And in a trio, each official has their zone. You trust each other. You don’t override each other publicly.
Pierre swallows the call. The decision is made. The match moves on.
What struck me wasn’t the injustice. It was the discipline. A different system, a different hierarchy, a different call. And you live with it. Because the alternative is chaos.
What the stands don’t see
The executives in that room, myself included, spent years watching referees from a distance, building confident opinions about their quality.
We had never seriously considered what the role actually requires.
Referees work in a trio. Each has a zone, a role, an angle of vision. The central referee doesn’t see what the assistant sees. The assistant doesn’t have the authority to contradict the central. The system only works if everyone accepts its constraints. The moment one person starts overriding another’s zone, the whole structure collapses.
I thought of every organization I’ve audited where someone was nominally responsible for a technical decision but had no actual authority to make it stick. Where the CTO flagged a risk and the CEO overrode it at the last minute based on a feeling. Where the “decision was made” in a meeting but three other people made three other decisions afterward.
A referee who gets contradicted by his colleague in front of sixty thousand people doesn’t have a bad colleague. He has a broken system.
Not deciding is also a decision
The part that stopped me cold came near the end.
Pierre said: not saying anything is also a decision.
A referee’s silence has consequences exactly like his whistle. Except we never replay the abstentions after the match. We only analyze the interventions. The non-calls, the moments where the referee let it go, the close calls that were left to continue — nobody reviews those.
I sat there for two hours listening to football.
I kept thinking about COMEX meetings. About tech decisions avoided for months. About executives who wait for a decision to make itself.
It doesn’t make itself. The silence has consequences. The delayed call to replace an architecture, to close a product line, to exit a client relationship that costs more than it produces — that silence is a decision too. It just gets replayed differently. Not on the pitch. In the P&L.
Who plays the referee in your company?
There’s a question underneath all of this that I never hear asked directly:
In your organization, who has the actual authority to make a call and have it hold?
Not who has the title. Not who calls the meetings. Who, when they blow the whistle, has the rest of the organization move on without relitigating the call?
Some companies have a clear answer. Most don’t. Most have a title and a reality that don’t match. The CEO thinks the CTO decides on technical matters. The CTO thinks he needs buy-in from the CFO. The CFO thinks it’s a product question. Nobody whistles. The play continues. The foul compounds.
A referee can’t do his job if the players don’t know what the whistle means.
In your company, who plays the referee? And does everyone agree on that casting?
