The distorted dialogue between coaches and referees

During this season there have been so many expulsions of coaches in Italian football Seria A. The phenomenon reflects a level of occupational stress that coaches often have difficulty controlling and consequently the field during the matches inveigh against referees. What might be the causes:

Pressure - There is a strong demand from the Club managers and fans to win and the result and also the inability of the Clubs to allow, with rare exceptions, at the coach to work on targets that are not only those of the next game.

Insecurity - The effect is that the coach will likely exonerated if he loses a few games or if he is not meet the expectations of the president.

Exposure - The coaches are daily on the newspapers and sports broadcasts. Around them spread a  continuous gossip exposes their choices to the ongoing discussion of the public and journalists, which are interrupted only during the game to get up immediately after, during the post-game interviews.

Cohesion - Coach complaints are also a way of shifting the referee’s attention to themselves in order to achieve a team cohesion effect and an increase in the aggressiveness of the players in response to the frustration derived from their coach’s warning or ejection.

Under these conditions it is not easy to carry out their work and certainly for the coaches can be useful to engage in mental coaching  programs to improve their ability to manage the stress they need to cope during their job. On the other hand, this is an improvement approach used by the managers of the companies to improve their own leadership.

Finally, it must be said that referees should also be better prepared, they often prove to be touchy and want to remind with extreme gestures that they are the ones in charge on the field. And so we are very far from Paolo Casarin’s, when he used to explain to referees that they “are guests” and therefore they should know how to convey this mentality even in the hottest situations of the matches. On the other hand, it is completely unknown what the mental preparation of our referees is today.