Quotes About Referees

#1. Referees don't come down here with a particular flavoured shirt on.

Steve Coppell

#2. No, we discuss it as fans. When we see the game, we talk about what we thought was a call or a foul or no foul. We just have to deal with that in the game. There's gonna be plenty more of those. Referees are humans, so it's not a problem.

Tim Howard

#3. China manufacturing was a game played on a field without referees.

Paul Midler

#4. Violence never settles anything should be debated by the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin, with the city fathers of Carthage as referees.

Robert A. Heinlein

#5. I never comment on referees and I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat.

Ron Atkinson

#6. I want to congratulate again Mike Dean. I think his performance was unbelievable and I think when referees have unbelievable performances, I think it's fair that as managers we give them praise. So fantastic performance.

Jose Mourinho

#7. He does not depend on insider tips, crooked referees, or other sorts of hustles to make his bets. Nor does he have a "system" of any kind. He uses computer simulations, but does not rely upon them exclusively.

Nate Silver

#8. The objective of a referee is not to get mentioned. I tell a lot of young referees that not being mentioned is king. If you can achieve that, that then it has been a pretty good game.

Alan Lewis

#9. On how to make the game more exciting - Eliminate the referees, raise the basket four feet, double the size of the basketball, limit the height of the players to 5 feet 9 inches, bring back the centre jump, allow taxi drivers in for free and allow the players to carry guns.

Al McGuire

#10. All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It's my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I've won or lost. At sunrise, I'm out again, giving it the old try.

Ray Bradbury

#11. Damn referees, I'll miss them less than anybody.

Abe Lemons

#12. I want fifteen referees at this fight ... because there ain't no one man who can keep up with the pace I'm gonna set except me

Muhammad Ali

#13. From my own point of view, I hope everybody would realise that people who work in Scottish football - referees included - are always under terrific scrutiny.

Walter Smith

#14. If the referee happens to be in the way you just yell, 'move or I'll break your ankles!' which I used to do with referees. Some refs will stop and watch the fight it drives you crazy.

Harold Lederman

#15. We all believe we have found the finest of diktat that applies our perfect future, but do we believe the world needs referees.

Rudolf Hess

#16. Referees and linesmen are killing teams.

Ashley Cole

#17. Although people rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert.

J.K. Rowling

#18. Profit by your own mistakes and profit by the mistakes of others. The referees were calling ball handling violations like they were getting commissions.

John Kessel

#19. Don't you think it's strange how many referees work at Footlocker?

Jim Gaffigan

#20. What American people and what the markets want is a fair and level playing-field, where the rules are clearly elucidated, where the referees are competent, and where we know that the game is not rigged.

James Chanos

#21. Referees are only human, I think.

Phil Kearns

#22. How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'

Craig Brown

#23. I JUST GET ON WITH MY GAME AND LET THE REFEREES DO THEIR JOB.

Lionel Messi

#24. I would say the referees have the toughest game to call. I would say that there's a lot of officiating done by announcers, local announcers. Sometimes you should listen to a game from both feeds, and you'd think you were listening to completely different games.

David Stern

#25. The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game.

Bill Shankly

#26. I'm aware that the World Cup is probably the greatest spectacle in the world of sport, and that's despite the referees that have been found to have fixed games specifically.

David Stern

#27. The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

Bill James

#28. Referees are the law. They have a whistle. They blow it. And that whistle is the articulation of God's justice.

Harold Pinter

#29. It's a game of integrity. There's no referees out there. We all respect each other.

Jordan Spieth

#30. I don't understand referees. It appears like some players can't even be touched, but in my case, everyone can hit me as hard as they can.

Cristiano Ronaldo

#31. I went into umpiring at age 16. I got into officiating because of the fact that I could not stand the referees that worked our basketball games.

Doug Harvey

#32. Time is only linear for engineers and referees.

Craig Ferguson

#33. The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.

Julian Schwinger

#34. I loved the glamour and excitement of the games and, in particular, knowing the names of each and every one of the referees - that's because my mom, a former basketball player, would yell at them from our front-row seats for making bad calls!

Hannah Storm

#35. Referees need help. Players are getting faster and fitter and too many referees are making decisions from behind the play. They see a tangle of legs, they are asked to make a decision with one, often obscured look at high speed.

Andy Townsend

#36. The pace of the game demanded a referee who was fit. It is an indictment of our game. You see referees abroad who are as fit as butcher's dogs. We have some who are fit. He wasn't fit.

Alex Ferguson

#37. Most of us are referees at heart; we like to call throws and errors on someone else.

John Kessel

#38. I lost count of the number of referees who came to me both at Derby and Forest and said, 'I'd just like to express my thanks. I love matches involving your team. We never have any trouble with them.

Brian Howard Clough

#39. Fighters today are much bigger, stronger and quicker and not only that but referees, judges and doctors back then were very strict and if your head got busted up the fight would be stopped.

Larry Holmes

#40. This fight should be dubbed, 'No Excuses.' If Carl Froch beats me, there won't be any excuses. I beat Carl Froch, there shouldn't be any excuses. No judges, no referees, no nothing. May the best man win.

Andre Ward

#41. As all of us with any involvement in sports knows, no two umpires or no two referees have the same strike zone or call the same kind of a basketball game.

Herb Kohl

#42. I did think there were one or two referees who had a personal thing against me. It wasn't them versus Celtic - it was them against me! I just think they wanted to take me on.

Gordon Strachan

#43. We talked to the referees before the game; there's always new situations to adjust, for the refs and for us as well. Even on the ice, it's good for players to talk and interact with the referee.

Peter Bondra