launched an investigation<\/a> following online abuse directed at the official.<\/p>\n“If you’re continually told you’re not very good, whether that be by people in the media, by pundits, or even ex-officials, then people’s mental health could potentially suffer,” he says. <\/p>\n
“The footballing culture in general is, ‘we need to win this game at all costs’.<\/p>\n
“The lengths that people go to post-game with a lot of things now to spread false narratives, to spread malicious conspiracy theories… it creates a hugely negative environment for people to operate in.”<\/p>\n
Taylor is also concerned by the treatment of officials in grassroots football, adding “every single weekend you can go to any local park across the UK and you can see a parent on the sideline verbally abusing a young referee. That’s not an environment conducive to people getting better. I don’t understand how people think that’s acceptable.”<\/p>\n
Asked whether it is fair for top referees to expect a high level of scrutiny given what can be at stake on the pitch, Taylor says: “I wouldn’t argue against scrutiny being there.”<\/p>\n
But he adds: “I’m not saying scrutiny isn’t there to be expected, but everybody who watches football always sees a game through the eyes of their team. And the result of a football match and the culmination of a football season is multi-faceted.<\/p>\n
“It’s not dependent on one match official decision. It’s not dependent on one player missing one penalty in a game. It’s not dependent on one coach making one tactical error during a game. Playing over 38 games…<\/p>\n
“So you say the argument one decision has cost somebody the whole season… it’s just factually not true because there’ll be plenty of other incidents in a game or over that season where the results of games have been affected.<\/p>\n
“What I’m saying is that you can have scrutiny and you can have critique. But it’s very rarely balanced. Nobody really talks about the positive side of things a lot of time these days, either.”<\/p>\n
Referees’ body Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) has a team of psychologists responsible for match officials’ mental wellbeing, and works with mental health charity Mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Taylor is not on social media as he does not want to “waste time” reading negative comments or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":487609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[748,393,4884,12,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-487608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115348403830506608","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}