“That’s where the problems come from”
Merk puts pressure on the referee
April 27, 2022, 9:10 p.m
Markus Merk is once the best referee in the world three times. He is currently not happy with the situation surrounding his successor generation. The former top referee wants to see more performance – and calls for more responsibility to be taken on again.
In the recent discussion about the increasing number of wrong decisions in football, Markus Merk spoke out in favor of referees having more decision-making authority when working with video assistants. “You have to train the referees so that they can do their primary job better again: having the main responsibility on the field. He can’t just be the vicarious agent of the video assistant,” said the three-time World Referee of the Year to the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger “.
Merk described the interface between the referee and assistants as a “grey area”. “We don’t talk enough about the actual decision-maker. And that’s the main referee. He has to be responsible. Of course it’s human and understandable to hold back when you have a backup. But that’s exactly where the problems come from,” he said 60 year old former referee.
The referees are no longer used to being the decision-makers on the pitch. “But it’s the wrong way. It counteracts the core competence of the referee: to decide situationally and with full responsibility,” complained Merk.
At the same time, the former top referee would like more competition among German referees: “If a referee is active in the Bundesliga today, then he is almost impossible to be relegated. In the last twenty years there have been maybe one or two referees who had to leave the league for performance reasons “, criticized Merk. “We have to see that we bring the principle of performance back into the minds of the active referees.”
Merk is critical of the suggestion by German record international Lothar Matthäus to provide VAR with former professionals to help and thus possibly reduce the number of wrong decisions: “I don’t believe in putting someone else in this room, it’s already full enough. There would be another level of decision-making and everything would be even more complicated. In my opinion, that wouldn’t help anyone.”