Former footballers urged to become referees

Refereeing has long been an issue among the clubs in domestic football and there was no exception yesterday when the working sub-committees for BFF's professional league management committee sat with club representatives of the Bangladesh Premier League.

Abahani manager Satyajit Das Rupu, along with other club officials, were vocal over the performance of referees who are giving out varying decisions over apparently similar offenses. The club representatives requested the committee to appoint a separate referees' assessor for each match to find out the mistakes. The clubs also asked the committee to consider grooming match commissioners and referees' assessors from outside the pool of former referees.

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Currently the match commissioner is performing the responsibilities of the referees' assessor apart from his own duties.

"The meeting was dominated by discussion over refereeing. We got some new proposals regarding the referees, and we are going to send the proposals to the referees' sub-committee and hope those will be implemented in future," BFF vice-president and sub-committee convenor Ataur Rahman Bhuiyan Manik told media after the meeting.

"We have already appointed a referees' consultant from India and will try to resolve the issues regarding the referees. We are hoping the issues will be solved soon," he added.

In the last edition of the BPL, one particular referee conducted most of the matches of a big club while the game's governing local body refrained from appointing him in matches of another big club. Manik, however, claimed that they did not receive any such allegation.

The referees' committee has also kept a couple of good referees and assistant referees away from conducting the ongoing league matches, raising questions over the fairness of the committee.

"The issues were discussed at the meeting. Our referees' consultant noted those down and promised us to wipe out these types of issues. The consultant also suggested to increase the number of referees to a minimum of 500 from the existing 70," Manik said, adding that they would invite former footballers to become referees, match commissioners and the referees' assessors.