This week Uefa trialled its goalline referee plan in public for the first time. This is a new mob-handed approach to refereeing, which sees an additional ref lurking behind each goal, occasionally shouting things like "corner!" or "way to go!" into his microphone headset, and which could, according to Uefa, be wheeled out as early as next season.
It's an idea that manages to be both fascinating and rubbish at the same time. It's also oddly demeaning for the official involved. The goalline ref skulks about in a small rectangle. He doesn't even have a whistle. He's essentially a snitch, a goal-hanger and a weak-chinned refereeing lookalike who can probably also do you an Argos security guard and that bloke who stares you out while you smuggle 12 jumbo Toblerones through the green aisle at Customs.
If your seven-year-old son told you he wanted to become a goalline referee you'd sit him down at the kitchen table for a long talk and then stay up all night brooding over a bottle of cooking sherry and tearfully blaming yourself.
In practice the goalline referee raises other questions about increase and dilution. After all, why stop at six referees? Why not have eight? Why not 25? Uefa needs to know what it's getting itself into here. Referees are like feral racoons. Left unchecked they swarm and multiply.
A while back there were problems with referee infestation in parts of south London. We had gangs of them roaming the streets. It was very intimidating. They stood outside Londis talking hurriedly with their hands over their mouths. You'd leave your house and find a referee sitting on the bonnet of your car. Eventually the council put down traps and poison, but you still hear them at night establishing a friendly rapport with one another or making needlessly extravagant "play-on" gestures.
The real problem, of course, is that Uefa is addicted to referees. It glories in their increase. Six referees at every league match, 245 referees at work in England every Saturday. Ten million referees worldwide. A human pyramid of referees stretching up to the moon. Uefa has a problem.
It's the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. We've all been tempted. You start off enjoying referees socially. Referees make you feel good. They make you feel popular. Soon you realise all your friends are referees. The people you meet only talk about the referees they've already had and where they're going to get more referees from next.
Until one day you wake up and you're in a dingy basement room at an FA-accredited training facility in Cheshire. You're surrounded by referees. The remains of last night's referees - the tattered flags, the charred plastic earpiece - are by your bed. There's a whistle in your mouth. You've got referee under your fingernails. And your first thought is: referees.
This is what seems to have happened to Uefa. The referee has become its junk, the two-footed lunge inside the area is its improvised plastic pipe, Andy Gray saying "that is an unbelievable decision" its cigarette lighter and the Level One grade refereeing instruction course its pusher man.
From here there's only one sure way to kick the habit. The first step is to admit that you've got a problem. The second step is to decide maybe you should no longer respond to the squealed demands and contrived controversies of television companies desperate to wedge themselves even further beneath the skin of a game already horribly contorted by over-exposure. And the third step is to just, you know, stop going on about referees so much.
