Paolo Casarin has published the long story of his life as a referee, head of Italian referees, and a world-class football official.
The book is titled “Life and Thoughts of a Referee – Sixty Years On and Off the Football Field”, published by Rizzoli with a preface by Gianni Mura.
Casarin takes us through his life, from his first matches refereed on dusty local pitches to the international stages of FIFA and UEFA. It is a personal and sincere account that is also the story of a kind of football that no longer exists: one without VAR, without replays, but full of passion, respect, and—at times—loneliness.
A direct and passionate book, filled with anecdotes, vision, and reflections on a central yet often misunderstood role.
Casarin offers a definition of football “as the search for the most effective way to win a challenge: two groups of players opposing each other, led by two masters on the sidelines, striving to gain a temporary superiority.”
He explains, using terminology introduced by Piaget, that “in football as a game, the processes of assimilation prevail”—playing according to one’s abilities—whereas “in football as a spectacle, accommodation processes dominate, since the player is forced to constantly change himself to meet the team’s needs.”
His life in football has been an endless experience—an existential journey lived as a person, not as an authoritarian referee intent on asserting his power.
In meetings with referees during his time as assignor, he continued to promote this approach to refereeing performance, always saying that the referee was a guest of the teams, and that each one had to feel responsible for his role—also because, the following Sunday, another colleague would take to the same field and should find a positive atmosphere influenced by what had happened in previous matches.
Thanks to this positive approach to the psychological dimension of refereeing, I had the opportunity to work with Paolo Casarin throughout the years he served as Serie A referee assignor.
He devoted a chapter of the book to our collaboration, titled “The Psychological Area of Refereeing Activity”, in which he describes the work we did during those years.
Together, we introduced psychological preparation for matches, assessed referees’ attentional and interpersonal skills, and much more. Personally, those years were among the best moments of my professional life. It was a long but unique period—because when Casarin’s tenure in that role ended, so did my collaboration, and since then, no one else has ever dealt with these aspects of refereeing life.
