There is a circle of children around Angel Jimenezwhom they call “the arbiter of peace”. One more match has captured the attention of all the protagonists of a grassroots football match. “I ask you to play honestly. If I’m wrong and you know it, tell me. Let’s play with the VAR of honesty. You will feel very good doing it.” The players understand the message perfectly.
It’s the parents’ turn: “What do they want for their children and other children? Surely the same as me. That they have fun and acquire values. That is impossible if we don’t all respect each other. No insults and no pressure“. It will be up to them to apply the other tool with which this Andalusian referee has managed to eradicate insults and aggression from his matches: “The VAR of the fans is: encourage, encourage and respect.”
“Help message” from the Technical Committee of Referees
Jiménez is an ambassador for Platform 090, which means “zero violence in 90 minutes”, a program of the Sports Area of the Malaga City Council. He also gives middle school and high school class since 2001 at the Colegio de Maravillas (Benalmádena, Málaga), where he imparts justice, and above all values, in the school league.
He has always been related to refereeing, since the 1993/1994 season. He became an assistant in the Third Division. Until creating a safe environment in his matches, he went through all kinds of situations that continue to be in the daily lives of his teammates, both professional and in modest categories. In regional and youth football, the problem has worsened to such an extent that there are continuous communications from the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) denouncing the situation.
A few days ago, the CTA once again launched a “help message” against the verbal and physical violence that the referees are “repeatedly suffering”, especially minors and those who act in non-professional categories.” For the governing body of referees, it is becoming “an almost impossible mission to perform our duties in the midst of an unbreathable environment with insults, threats and attacks. Much more so when it comes to minors who are in the process of training.”
Jiménez was one of the referees who carried out his job with a gag every weekend. In the fall of 2006 he suffered an episode that led to the birth of the ‘Peace Arbiter’. “In the first half of a match a fan kept insulting me. He told me that He had every right to do it because he had paid an entry fee. I replied that not at all. That she was within her rights to disagree with a decision, but never to step on a person’s dignity,” she recalls.
“You should have died”
That was the straw that broke a camel’s back that I emptied every week to continue refereeing. In a professional match, The insults fade into the crowd and the show continues.. In modest football the offense expands like a shock wave. Hatred is heard without filters, as happened in a duel where Jiménez and his colleagues fought in very difficult circumstances.
When they were heading to the field they were about to suffer a serious accident. “We avoid certain death by centimeters. We saw a car come flying towards us. Crashed into vehicle. We stopped to lend a hand. It was terrible on an emotional level. We told the teams to understand us on an emotional level if we were not at 200%,” Jiménez recalls.
The referee considers that they did a very decent refereeing for what they had experienced. But during the meeting they experienced a terrible episode. “There were a few minutes left and you heard in the stands: ‘You should have been killed on the road.’ It was a very serious situation,” explains the referee, who looked at his teammates. Nobody understood anything that afternoon in 1998.
I understand that you stopped the game…
No, we had violence so normalized… I wouldn’t have continued, but at that time I was not yet the ‘Arbiter of Peace’.
Almost 30 years have passed since that crude chapter. “Are things better? Honestly, I don’t know. What I do ask for, with full knowledge of the facts, is that the protocol that I put in place and that the committee later took as an example,” responds the Andalusian braid. The protocol referred to by the ‘Referee of Peace’ has allowed him to put an end to the insults and attacks in his matches.
At the first insult, a warning is issued to the field delegates. They transmit to the crowd a situation of inappropriate behavior. After the second verbal attack, the police were notified and after the third, the encounter ended. The rules are clear and Jiménez has applied them with absolute force.
T-shirt worn by Ángel Jiménez against attacks in grassroots football. / EPE
“Today the Arbiter of peace comes, you cannot insult him”
“But sadly I continue to see in the fields how my colleagues suffer, because the protocol is not followed. I remember that in some field they said: ‘Today the ‘Arbiter of Peace’ comes, you cannot insult himr’. I felt sorry, it was because I was there, not because stopping insulting was the right thing to do. However, only through absolute firmness can these behaviors be stopped,” she specifies.
Ángel Jiménez recognizes the complexity of applying his tools in a professional match, but brings the example of tennis to the fore. “In this sport there may be a court where you play in front of 12,000 or 14,000 spectators. But as soon as someone does not behave, the game does not continue. Everyone understands that their sport cannot be dirty. In football everyone does their part. whatever he wants. If we firmly applied a protocol and suspended 500 matches nationwide, we would send a true message: not everything goes,” he concludes.
2024-04-01 10:50:24
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