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Reffing Hell: Stuck in the middle of a game gone wrong
YOU’RE A SH*T REF AND YOU SHOULD F*CK OFF BACK TO ENGLAND!
For the best part of a decade, writer and journalist Ian Plenderleith has been refereeing amateur football in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. Through parental mass brawls, on-field fistfights, choleric coaches and foul-mouthed threats, he endures a never-ending lack of respect and sportsmanship, pocked with flashes of humour and even half-decent behaviour.
This book tells you what’s going on in a referee’s head. Is he scared? Sometimes. Is he depressed? Only every second Sunday. Is he biased? Of course not. Does he feel a warm glow when the belligerent, moaning striker fires wide from six yards out? In short, he certainly does, and it’s often enough to make him want to show up again next weekend.
Yet no matter how poor the players and the leagues they grace, every single game tells its own story about the teams that play for fun, but never seem to be having any. About the average, the bad, the ugly, the hopeless and the sporadically unhinged. And how over the course of 90 fraught minutes, rage, deceit, scorn or even a spontaneous wave of hate-shattering laughter are never more than a blast of the whistle away.
For the best part of a decade, writer and journalist Ian Plenderleith has been refereeing amateur football in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. Through parental mass brawls, on-field fistfights, choleric coaches and foul-mouthed threats, he endures a never-ending lack of respect and sportsmanship, pocked with flashes of humour and even half-decent behaviour.
This book tells you what’s going on in a referee’s head. Is he scared? Sometimes. Is he depressed? Only every second Sunday. Is he biased? Of course not. Does he feel a warm glow when the belligerent, moaning striker fires wide from six yards out? In short, he certainly does, and it’s often enough to make him want to show up again next weekend.
Yet no matter how poor the players and the leagues they grace, every single game tells its own story about the teams that play for fun, but never seem to be having any. About the average, the bad, the ugly, the hopeless and the sporadically unhinged. And how over the course of 90 fraught minutes, rage, deceit, scorn or even a spontaneous wave of hate-shattering laughter are never more than a blast of the whistle away.
- GenresSports
416 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 8, 2022
12 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Ian Plenderleith
9 books13 followersMy latest book (published September 2025) is another collection of football short stories, The Last Amateur (Halcyon Publishing), and is "inspired by the amorality, the greed, and the somehow still irresistible allure of the modern game", to quote the cover blurb. It follows my book about being an amateur ref (Reffing Hell, 2022) and my counter-Hornby supporter's memoir The Quiet Fan (2018). That book was preceded by my historical analysis of the wildly entertaining North American Soccer League of the 1970s - 'Rock n Roll Soccer', which was published in the UK by Icon Books in 2014, and by Thomas Dunne in the US in 2015. My debut was back in 2001, For Whom the Ball Rolls (Orion Books), my first foray into football fiction.
The rest of my life has been spent playing, coaching, reffing, watching and reporting on football, with occasional interference from family and friends.
The rest of my life has been spent playing, coaching, reffing, watching and reporting on football, with occasional interference from family and friends.
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December 27, 2024
Took me a solid 5 minutes to get to the 4th line of this book because the first two sentences had me in stitches.
Hilarious and brilliantly written, "Reffing Hell" by Ian Plenderleith makes you seriously question why amateur football (or "soccer" for you pesky Americans) in Germany even exists.
Hilarious and brilliantly written, "Reffing Hell" by Ian Plenderleith makes you seriously question why amateur football (or "soccer" for you pesky Americans) in Germany even exists.
Displaying 1 of 1 review