Please Observe The Advantage Of Patience

Continuing Adventures, Norway, Sports | Working | September 7, 2026

I have posted several stories about my career as an amateur soccer referee before. Here’s another one.

One of the rules of the game is called “advantage”. It allows the referee to ignore a foul that has been committed if stopping the game and penalizing it actually benefits the offender. For instance, if a player runs through the defence, is fouled on the way, but manages to keep going and scores, he’d rather have the goal than be given a free kick.

As is well known to any sports referee, another thing that happens is that players yell at you. Any decision you make, someone will disagree. Put these two things together, and you have today’s story.

I was officiating a match when an attacker tried to dribble past a defender. He skipped past, and the defender grabbed his shirt and held him back. Immediately, a player on the attacking team started shouting very loudly for his teammate to receive a free kick.

Player: “Oi ref! Free kick!”

I was, in fact, about to blow my whistle and award the free kick, but then I noticed something: the attacker wasn’t giving up. He kept trying to fight his way past the defender, who was still holding and pulling the attacker’s shirt, arms, and shoulders. Several players now started joining in the shouts for a foul to be given.

Players: “Heeey! Ref! Ref!”

I quickly looked over at one of them while play continued. He was waving his arms frantically, shouting and appealing for a free kick, as if believing I hadn’t noticed the foul of his teammate.

I then returned to focus on what was now turning into a full-on wrestling match, both attacker and defender holding, pushing, shoving and fighting for the ball, all while still running beside each other.

Now, there’s nothing in the rules about how long a referee should wait before making a decision on advantage; it’s left up to the ref’s discretion. Normally, though, a ref will only wait a couple of seconds to see if the player gets an advantage immediately.

This time, it took longer. Five seconds, six, seven… In my head, the situation was still unresolved; the attacker was still trying to fight his way past the defender, and if he managed it, it would be an advantage. If he didn’t, I could always go back and award the free kick. That’s what I was preparing to do, holding the whistle in my mouth and getting ready to stop play.

The foul started perhaps twenty metres (around sixty-five feet) away from the goal. At this point, the ‘wrestlers’ had fought their way deep inside the penalty box, approaching the goal line. Meanwhile, the attacker’s teammates were getting louder and louder, not understanding that I was delaying the decision while looking to see if I could give them an advantage, and quite possibly believing that this referee must be both blind, deaf and stupid not to notice such an obvious foul being committed right in front of him. Especially one of them was now running right up to me and shouting from just a few feet away.

Player: “HEY! HEEEY! REF! OI!”

Then, resolution.

The attacker, brilliantly, made it all the way down to the goal line and managed to actually score, slotting the ball past the goalkeeper while still fighting off his opponent. He had made it all the way down to about three feet away from the goal, and I had delayed making a decision by so long that it felt like an eternity.

Now, though, I finally blew the whistle and awarded the goal instead of the free kick. The attacking team cheered the goal and ran up to the goalscorer to celebrate while I started running back to the middle of the field to restart the game.

As I passed the player who had shouted the loudest, I gave him a pointed look and said:

Me: “Get it now?”

Player: “Yep! Yep!”

He gave me a huge smile and two thumbs up.