It’s said that the mark of a good performance for a football referee is not being noticed. That was always going to be a tall order for Rebecca Welch, who on Saturday became the first woman to referee a Premier League match in Fulham’s 2-0 home defeat by Burnley.
Amid the glare of history and the adrenaline fug of 22 rule-bending millionaires, it was like asking a white hen to maintain a low profile in a fox’s den. As gender milestones go, it wasn’t quite up there with, say, Valentina Tereshkova being the first woman in space, but it was certainly a maiden voyage into a potentially hostile environment.
Perhaps some pressure was eased by Mary Earps, the England women’s football team’s goalkeeper winning the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award last week. That moment suggested that, in the nation’s eyes, football is no longer just a “man’s game”.
Then again, given the reaction in some quarters to Earps’s victory, the weight on Welch’s shoulders may have increased. Representing the Tyrannosaurus school of punditry, the former player, manager and England international for a mere 17 minutes, Joey Barton, dismissed Earps’s award as “more fucking nonsense”.
But Welch was in no mood for any nonsense herself. Inside the first 10 minutes she turned down two major appeals for fouls, giving the strong impression that she wasn’t going to stand for grown men falling over. Maybe she was looking for more of a woman’s game.
After 25 minutes she received her first boos and some half-hearted chants of “You don’t know what you’re doing” when she booked Fulham’s Calvin Bassey for a foul on Josh Brownhill. It felt like she had arrived, the initiation rite of her first Premier League yellow card.
Harsh? Fair? Whichever, it proved early on that she wasn’t a “homer”, one of those referees whose decisions lean towards the local support. And nor was she that other unloved type in black, an attention-seeking whistleblower.
The most disputed moment of the first half came in injury time when Welch turned down a Fulham penalty appeal for handball. VAR supported her decision, but, as they say, I’ve seen them given.
The truth is that referees have not enjoyed a golden season so far this year. There have been all manner of controversial decisions made worse by some dubious application of VAR. The issue that most concerns players, managers and supporters is clearly not about gender but competence.
If the likes of Barton and other less prominent social media trolls seem out of step with the times, then it’s worth remembering that it’s little more than a decade since Sky Sports’s celebrated duo Andy Gray and Richard Keys, thinking they were off air, felt entirely relaxed about denigrating female officials and other women in the industry.
They both castigated Sian Massey, one of the first female assistant referees, after she made a tight (but correct) offside call. “Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her…” said Keys.
“Yeah,” replied Gray, “can you believe that?”
‘The game’s gone mad,” complained Keys, deriding Karren Brady for highlighting sexism in football. “Do me a favour, love.”
The standard sexist joke about women and football used to be that they couldn’t understand the off-side rule, and would be better off putting the kettle on. That Gray and Keys were sacked (after further tapes emerged of their “prehistoric banter”) was a convulsive shock to the male-dominated system.
Nowadays it’s commonplace for women to chair football discussions on TV and to offer expert opinion. But the progress of female officials has been less speedy and conspicuous.
Welch, 40, was also the first woman to referee an English Football League match, when she carried the whistle in a League Two game between Harrogate Town and Port Vale in 2021.
She has been praised for her “resilience”, a quality that surely all referees require, because being the subject of a full stadium’s fury is the stuff of waking nightmares. Maintaining focus and exerting control over two groups of highly competitive men when thousands are loudly questioning your parentage is not a job for the faint of heart.
Fulham v Burnley is about as soft a landing as is possible in the Premier League. With Hugh Grant, who was in attendance, a regular visitor, it’s fitting that the atmosphere at Craven Cottage tends towards middle-class diffidence. When Welch and her assistants did a warm-up lap before the match, she received a round of polite applause from the Johnny Haynes stand.
Things heated up in the second half, as Welch handed out another couple of yellow cards. However, she maintained a quiet and calm authority, always alert and on her toes, and never intimidated by the occasion.
There will be tougher tests ahead, but you could say that in her Premier League debut she experienced the familiar fate of many women in a male-dominated workplace in almost passing unnoticed. In this case, there’s no higher praise.
