The project aims at investigating the referee as a crucial institution in the context of modern sports and, more generally, in modern societies. It is based on the observation that referees function as indispensable brokers at the nexus of regulations, athletes, audience, and associations. At the same time, they ensure the establishment of and compliance with regional, national, and international standards of comparability. The referee can thus be regarded as an essential factor in the emergence and stabilisation of the transnational ‘comparative context of world sports’. Despite the fundamental role of the referee, whose metaphorical impact far exceeds the realm of sports, the history of this figure has yet to be examined from a longitudinal perspective. The present project aims at filling this lacuna. It uses the examples of two specifically selected types of sport, football and tennis—both of which share similar histories of institutionalisation, but display marked differences in regard to the role of referees—to examine the duties, actions, and reputation of referees from the Victorian period to the world sports of the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis will yield insights into two basic social processes which coincide in the emergence of the referee: on the one hand, the history of how authority was attained (i.e. through institutionalisation and professionalisation), stabilised (for instance, through systematic training and scientification), and put at risk (by violent behaviour, referee misconduct, and scandals); and on the other hand, the history of international convergence and standardisation. This project thus combines research interests in the field of the history of modern societies with questions originating from the history of internationalisation and sports history.
In order to address these issues, the corpus of source materials will include documents of British sports associations and international governing bodies (FIFA and I[L]TF) as well as print media, training materials/textbooks and (partly autobiographical) reflections of referees themselves.
