Review

Preface

Germany won the tenth 'Euro Championship', but the first European finals to feature sixteen teams was generally considered a disappointment - low-scoring games, perceived negative tactics, the majority of knockout matches being forced into penalty kicks and in addition to disappointing crowds for the non-England matches (but there was widespread relief at the lack of hooligan incidents).

The disappointment was, though nuance is needed, also widely shared on the refereeing front (including by the authorities themselves). We'll look at why, what changes were made by UEFA afterwards, and shed some light on the appointment process for the knockout rounds. 

Tournament

As far as most onlookers were concerned, Euro'96 got off to a bad start. The refereeing particularly on the second day of the tournament (in the games handled by Piero Ceccarini, David Elleray and Mario van der Ende) was perceived as excessively strict - after four matches, 31 yellow cards and 2 red cards had been issued (in the whole of Euro'92, there were 55 yellow cards given and none red in 15 matches). The referees were accused by both pundits and team managers of "looking for trouble" and being too pedantic.

UEFA were quite steadfast externally -- with a strongly-worded statement by president Lennart Johansson -- but also internally. When the referees committee met on the 19th June to determine the referees for the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals, they were satisfied with the level of refereeing and considered the number of sanctions issued to have been apt. It should also be added that the overall 'atmosphere' around the refereeing began to calm down as the group stage progressed, compared to the opening weekend.

The knockout stages were, though, a disaster. Both of the first two quarterfinals were decided by refereeing errors, and the performance in the third was one of the worst performances in recent major tournament history. All told, UEFA were only really satisfied with three (so less than half) of the referees they had 'promoted' into the knockout stage. At the end of the tournament, the internal view mirrored the external one: the refereeing at Euro'96 had not been good enough, and had fallen short.

Aftermath

After Euro'96 had finished and a period of reflection undertaken, the view of the referees committee began to further align with the popular one - the 'orientation' of the referees and refereeing guidelines was considered too punitive, and had created an unneccessary amount of distance between officials and teams. For Euro 2000, UEFA were keen to promote a 'common-sensical' brand of refereeing, as opposed to the official line of 'zero tolerance' which was displayed in '96: though a casual onlookers from nowadays would find himself agreeing more often with the referees than the critics when looking back at the tackles and challenges which drew the sanctions from the referees.

The really big change came not in that, but rather the 'attitude' that UEFA took towards their referees. They changed toward a more collaborative approach with the teams, and also focusing on a smaller cadres of refs considered for the top matches: an 'Elite Category' of referees, exactly as we know it today. 

Whereas there were forty referees who attended the UEFA Advanced Course at Sevilla in February 1996, the number was slashed down to the mid-twenties for the 1997 course in Cyprus. While the number reported was twenty-three, there were twenty-four referees who participated in the latter stages of the UEFA club competitions after that date, so it seems reasonable to take the attendees roughly as thus:

Marc Batta (fra),

Günter Benkö (aut),

Piero Ceccarini (ita),

Pierluigi Collina (ita),

Manuel Díaz Vega (esp),

David Elleray (eng),

Anders Frisk (swe),

José María García-Aranda (esp),

Bernd Heynemann (ger),

Hellmut Krug (ger),

Nikolaj Levnikov (rus),

Antonio López Nieto (esp),

Markus Merk (ger),

Urs Meier (sui),

Serge Muhmenthaler (sui),

Kim Milton Nielsen (den),

Rune Pedersen (nor),

Michel Piraux (bel),

Vítor Melo Pereira (por),

Sándor Puhl (hun),

Alfredo Trentalange (ita),

Gilles Veissière (fra),

Mario van der Ende (ned),

Ryszard Wójcik (pol).

Ten were 'new' names who had not been selected for Euro'96 (an 11th, Wojcik, was chosen in reserve). Two of the Euro'96 had retired (Goethals, Mottram) and another was injured (Gallagher). Of the fifteen European referees selected for the next World Cup, twelve appear here - excepted Hugh Dallas, Paul Durkin (Elleray resigned from the list) and Laszlo Vagner, despite like Wojcik being a Euro'96 stand-by. It is worth noting, not even neccessarily as a perceived criticism, that despite refereeing the final, Pierluigi Pairetto did not feature among the chosen referees in Cyprus (1997 was his last year as an international).

The final thing to mention is that, accordingly with this approach, beginning from Euro 2000 and continued ever since, the tournament ditched the 'flying in' referees as like European Cups duty and the referees had a 'camp' in the host country. This is underlined by the fact that even in the Covid-affected Euro in 2021, despite travelling around Europe, the referees were based in one location (Istanbul).

Appointments

UEFA rejected four performances in the group stage, but only ten referees were explicitly considered in discussions by the referees committee to take charge of either a quarterfinal, semifinal or final match. The list as per the committee discussions were as follows. The referees from countries who had advanced to the quarterfinals were not considered for the pre-appointments to the last three matches.

Quarterfinals: 

Marc Batta (fra), Hellmut Krug (ger), Antonio López Nieto (esp), Leif Sundell (swe); 

Mario van der Ende (ned).

Semifinals and final:

Leslie Mottram (sco), Pierluigi Pairetto (ita), Sándor Puhl (hun);

Gerd Grabher (aut), Serge Muhmenthaler (sui).

At the same time as releasing the four quarterfinal appointments, UEFA announced that the semifinal and final matches were to be handled by three referees (namely Mottram, Pairetto and Puhl), but that the specific appointments would be determined after the quarterfinals. This mirrored the strategy used in 1992, and was very likely done to avoid a repeat of the embarrasing episode for UEFA of 1988 when referee Ioan Igna arrived in the wrong city for his semifinal, due to a mix-up about which game he would referee (if the Netherlands had qualified for the opposite semifinal, Alexis Ponnet and Igna would have switched because Ponnet, of Belgium, could not have refereed the Dutch team). While it appears the committee changed their mind in 1992 between the period of pre-selecting the three referees and assigning them matches, it seems very likely to me in 1996 that it was only a case of keeping apart Mottram-England (and perhaps also Puhl-Spain) in the semifinals. Puhl explicitly had no chance of getting the final - UEFA ruled that it would be unfair to give the same referee the final of the World Cup and Euro in successive events.

In any tournament with twenty-four referees and seven knockout matches, there was always bound to be somebody left unhappy at the end. As in 1992, it seems there was a strong preference towards referees at the end of their career for the semifinal and final matches: this was the last chance for Mottram and Pairetto in a major tournament, while Sandor Puhl was the world's leading referee at that time. It seems this counted against Grabher and Muhmenthaler, for whom Euro'96 would actually turn out to be their only appearance in a big tournament. As for Van der Ende, a UEFA official briefed the media that (the perception of) his physical condition was the reason he was overlooked for the final stages. 

Precis

I believe UEFA Euro 1996, the tournament which ultimately disappointed on both the football and refereeing front, to have been the strictest ever big competition. The combination of the strong position of the referees committee (contrary to modern times!), the clear guidelines set out by that committee, and the organisation of the tournament where each referee had only one group match in order to impress UEFA and earn a knockout stage appointment, meant that referees had little contrary option but to act in the way that the authorities desired. The last point is important, and sets it apart from (for instance World Cup 2006), where some referees acted in a different way to the others. While it did all go wrong in the end Euro'96, at the time UEFA were satisfied with the level of refereeing in the group stage - and I'd agree with them. While the punitive era did return in terms of red cards in 1998, and in terms of specific technical behaviours in 2006 (such as not retreating), it didn't replicate what was seen in this tournament.

Naturally, the end of each biennal World Cup or Euro brings to an end its own 'era'. But, if for teams and players this was the strictest tournament ever, then for referees internally it was also quite strict too - but this was changed for future Euros, and indeed the system of being quite open about which referees had failed was ditched. Instead, from 2000 onwards, one could describe it as "all referees are equal, but some referees are more equal than others". Rejections were out, though they did exist internally, but rather UEFA put faith in 'the whole group of referees' and publicly defended their officiating, and thus also defending UEFA's selection of those referees (that is a very key point). After a said number of games in 2000 (for the sake of making an example), a member of the UEFA referees committee (either Volker Roth or Ken Ridden) would front a press conference where a number of clips were shown, and besides in extremely blatant situations where a defence wasn't possible, the referees committee explained why the referee or linesman had been correct.

This system, where UEFA and FIFA externally defend everything because admitting the referees got it wrong would also implicate them (their training, selection and appointments of referees) maintains today. One must though, I would reason, 'take the rough with the smooth' and quite clearly the "professionalisation" of the refereeing which tool place in between the Euros of 1996 and 2000 was both a neccessary and good thing. The curtain fell on this particular era for refereeing when Oliver Bierhoff's shot trundled over the line to win the final, the report on which can be found here.