An interview with bobbly Madley from the Athletic
Bobby Madley has never spoken about this side of his life in public and, now he feels ready to tell his story in full, he wants to make the point that he is not looking for sympathy. He makes that point several times, in fact, when plainly, it isn’t easy for him to be starting a discussion about the mental health of referees and how, on a personal level, depression brought him to the darkest moments of his life.
There were times, he says, when he found himself wondering whether it was worth carrying on and, though he avoids using the specific word, he is talking about contemplating suicide. “I haven’t gone into detail before about how deep it got for me and how dark it became,” he says. “I didn’t want to do that because I was worried I might be accused of over-dramatising or sensationalising it.”
Ultimately, though, he knows it is important for him to speak out when, until now, there has never really been any emphasis on how referees cope with the considerable pressures of their working lives and the culture in football that makes it the norm for members of their profession to be demonised.
“It got as low as it could,” he says. “I was hiding something inside. You know you’re having a tough time but you’re smiling with people and telling yourself you must be all right. Then, the moment the lights go out at night, your head comes alive. I’d be sitting up at three in the morning, in tears, thinking about everything, wondering what I could have done differently.
“I’d find myself going on Twitter to look through every post that was about me. I was searching for that one positive line, just one person to say, ‘Leave him alone, he’s a really nice guy’ or ‘He doesn’t deserve this’. I was tormenting myself and, of course, what you get on Twitter are people criticising you, and worse.
“It just didn’t get better. It was pretty much every night that I’d be up, crying, unable to sleep. It got to the stage where I wasn’t feeling well. I was tired all the time. I did a fitness test. I got halfway round and that’s the last I remember of it. I woke up in an ambulance.
“I’d collapsed. I spent the night in hospital. They did lumbar puncture, blood tests, everything. They thought I might have had a bleed on the brain or a mini-stroke. In the end, they put it down to stress. My body had shut down. Something inside my head went, ‘You can’t do this any more’. That was probably the point for me when it got really serious, when I thought, ‘I have to do something and I can’t keep living this way’.”
Until then, Madley had always tried to convince himself that it would pass. “Maybe it was a macho thing,” he says. “I was trying to be a ‘man’ because there is that awful thing where you think it is a sign of weakness to see a professional. In my head, I was still telling myself I was a strong character because, on a football pitch, you have to be strong. It took a long time — 14 months — for me to realise that I needed to do something about it.”
Madley had been removed — sacked, to put it another way — from the list of referees at the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) in August 2018. He moved to Oslo where his partner, Jenny, is a nurse and started refereeing lower-league games. He learned the language. People congratulated him for starting a new life. Inside, however, he was in turmoil. “I was destroying myself,” he says.
It was Jenny who booked the appointment with a therapist. “It changed my life,” he says. “I sat with him, I cried, and I talked about the darkest thoughts I’d had.
“Did it [suicide] cross my mind? A few times, yes. ‘Would you ever do you it?’ he asked me. And I said, ‘No, I’ve got two kids. I would never do it.’ Yes, it was something that had gone through my head but would I have ever done it? I know I wouldn’t, 100 per cent. I told him that and he was pretty ruthless. ‘Forget about it then,’ he said, ‘It’s off the table, so move on’.
“I needed someone to be as brutal and frank about it. I needed to hear those words — ‘Move on, it’s not an option, you’re not going to do it’ — because there were times when it did feel like the easiest option.
“That’s quite scary to look back on now. I’d never had experience of anybody I knew being in that position and, maybe being naive, I always used to think, ‘How could anyone do that when they have kids and families?’ but I get it now. I can understand. I was that low. The only thing keeping me going was Jenny, who has been brilliant, and having a fantastic family.”
As you may have read recently, Madley will shortly be picking up his career as a professional referee in England, starting initially in the lower leagues, after being informed by the PGMOL that it is willing to offer him a way back.
Madley is not proud of the story but it is one he will always have to confront because of the way it has shaped his life. He had been “fat-shamed”, to use his description, in a newspaper article written by the former referee Mark Halsey. The headline referred to him as “Blobby Bobby” and had left him feeling self-conscious.
A man with a walking disability walked past his car and this is the part that Madley will never be able to take back. He took a six-second video on his phone and sent it to a friend with the message, “
**** me, I have a chance of winning the parents’ race this year.”
The context is important (Madley had a running joke about whether he was going to take part in the race) and it was intended, he says, as self-deprecating humour. But he has never hidden from the fact it was not a pleasant thing to do.
A while later, he had an argument with his friend and a memory stick containing the video clip, along with an anonymous letter, was sent to his bosses. Madley, who had been refereeing since the age of 16, was called in for a disciplinary hearing and told he was being let go. He was 32. As he says, he is not after sympathy here — he knows he screwed up. He has always blamed himself because of “my own regrettable, naive and stupid actions”.
This is fundamentally the reason why he sank into depression rather than anything to do with the usual stresses of the job or the way a football referee, perhaps like no other job in sport, is expected to endure abuse as part of their routine. Yet the past 16 months have not just given him time to analyse his own life but also the way referees, as a whole, are treated and the culture that allows it to be their way.
Madley, like many of us, has been reading about Caroline Flack, the English TV presenter who took her own life last weekend, and what it tells us about today’s society. “It’s an absolute tragedy,” he says. “It has been all over the news in Norway, too, but it frustrates me because I see people writing all these messages that ‘the press have to stop this’ and ‘social media has to change’ but then I look back two weeks and the same people think it’s absolutely fine to do this to a professional referee.
“The mentality is: it’s not a human being, it’s a job, and it’s OK to abuse someone in that job. But it’s not OK and it is a human being. We’ve got to create some kind of society in football where people think this is unacceptable.”
Earlier in his career, Madley’s old mates from Wakefield used to play a game called “beat the Tweet” where they would search his name on Twitter and email him some of the more vicious messages. They found it amusing and strange that their friend, someone they regarded as a normal, down-to-earth guy who loved football and was good for the occasional pint, could be held up as a figure of hate. Madley could laugh along most of the time — “I had some really cruel mates” — but some of the messages were so sinister, so incredibly malicious and over the top, that he has kept them as examples of what referees have to endure.
One was from a Liverpool fan during an FA Cup tie at Crystal Palace in 2015. “I hope the next time Robert Madley goes for a shower, gas comes out instead of water,” it read.
Madley’s list of controversies — let’s face it, every referee has a list — includes the sending-off of Fabricio Coloccini in a Newcastle-Sunderland fixture. For that, there was another barrage of hate. “Hope Bobby Madley goes home to find his whole family dead,” read one message.
Sending off Coloccini during the Wear-Tyne derby brought further abuse (Photo: Mark Runnacles/Getty Images)
Another came from a 15-year-old who found an account for @robertmadley, assumed it was the referee, and sent a message telling him to “have a bath in acid”.
Madley has been in touch with the recipient. “This poor guy lives in Vermont. I spoke to him and he said he used to get abuse every single weekend. I said, ‘Mate, you’ve got to get a profile picture so people know it’s not me. You can’t just have a Twitter egg’. He was getting the most horrific abuse and he could never understand why.”
Ironically, Twitter has also been very good to Madley. The blog he released on New Year’s Eve to explain the reasons why he had lost his job, in the form of a long and cathartic mea culpa, was seen by 600,000 people and “liked” almost 39,000 times. There have been nearly 2,500 private messages and he has tried to reply to each one. Some have criticised him and, again, he has accepted that is justified. Others have shared stories about how their own lives have been ruined by one silly, momentary error. Some have left him in tears.
There is no doubt, however, that Madley has seen how social media can work the other way. The wild rumours, for example, when he was initially removed from the referees’ list. “I’m a Huddersfield fan, Huddersfield being the Terriers, and I think it was a Leeds fan who put out a comment that I was a ‘dog botherer’. Then it just snowballed online.
“People were putting up pictures, quite inventive stuff, and some of them were funny. But then people started tagging in the police and the RSPCA and it started to get out of hand. All of a sudden, it was ‘trending’ number nine worldwide. Suddenly, people were saying they had seen a video and that I should be arrested. Then, there were animal rights campaigners saying, ‘I know where he lives’. I ended up needing police protection, all from a nonsense rumour.”
At one stage, Madley was in the crowd to watch Yorkshire take on Nottinghamshire in a T20 cricket match. He is a proud Yorkshireman who still holds the record for Ossett Town juniors (91 goals in a season) and was once an up-and-coming player in the youth systems at Barnsley and Leeds United. But that day at Headingley, he found out, the hard way, what it had done to his reputation.
“I was in my Yorkshire shirt. It was a packed crowd and two other Yorkshire fans started making these comments. I don’t think they were drunk — they just thought they were being big and clever,” he says.
“I lost my head that day and it nearly ended in a physical encounter. I’m normally very composed but I just thought, ‘No, I’m not coming to watch a cricket game to be verbally abused. I’m not willing to let these people try to embarrass me.’ It was actually some Nottinghamshire fans who came over and told these boys ‘enough’s enough’. It was a crazy moment but that’s the power of social media. It can be brilliant but, as we have seen recently, it can destroy people.”
The message he would like to convey is a simple one: be kinder, remember that referees are human, too. He is not asking for an amnesty and he understands there will be times when players and fans are so caught up in the sport they will lose their temper.
“People will shout at you during the game but then you go into the bar after the game and they are the first people to buy you a pint,” he says. “Football creates that emotion and, in a strange way, it’s one of the things I like. But there is a line. People have to know when to stop because what’s worse is that this is happening to 15 and 16-year-olds. It filters down.”
Earlier this week, he met a 15-year-old referee, Rhiannon Stevens, who was verbally abused by two adults during a game and took the case to the Football Association, leading to the offenders being banned. Madley presented her with a shirt — #lovethewhistle — on behalf of Ref Support, a charity which does a lot of fine work to help protect match officials. He had flown in from Oslo to give a talk at Paulton Rovers, from the Southern League, and there was a lot of warmth towards him from an audience comprising many current and former referees.
One game in particular is ingrained in Madley’s mind: Bournemouth versus West Ham from Boxing Day, 2017. It was a 3-3 draw but Bournemouth’s last goal, scored by Callum Wilson in the fourth minute of stoppage time, should never have been allowed and another of their players, Simon Francis, ought to have been sent off for a high kick on Cheikhou Kouyate. Madley saw it at the time as a yellow-card offence, for reasons he cannot fully explain, and there was no VAR at the time to correct his mistake.
“It’s strange as a referee because you don’t remember your good games,” Madley says. “You remember the bad ones, though. It was hard. You don’t need Match of the Day to tell you. There are no excuses. I didn’t referee well that day and the drive home… well, it was tough. You drive on your own because the rules state you have to. It was five hours back to where I lived in the north. It was snowing. I was talking to my mates and my brother [Andrew is another PGMOL referee]. I always listen to the radio, the phone-ins, and I was getting crucified.
“I was being destroyed on national radio and trying to concentrate on a five-hour drive. It puts you in a difficult position to keep your head straight and get home safely. I sulk for three days and I’m probably a nightmare to live with. Just because you referee a Premier League game, it doesn’t mean your skin is that thick you can shut it out. But then you have to move on because you have another game.”
It is easy to understand why some referees might not be able to take this level of scrutiny. The PGMOL has two psychologists and, though Madley did not take up the offer, he will always be grateful that he was told he could speak to them even after losing his job.
He, in turn, has tried to use his Twitter account to show that referees are real people with real feelings and perhaps dissuade supporters from thinking that abusing them is accepted as the norm. “I’ve made a point that I will never throw an ex-colleague under the bus,” he says. “I’ll never come out and start saying, ‘Rhat’s a terrible decision’. But there’s always a reason for a decision, even a mistake, so I’ve tried to use Twitter to help educate and bring football fans and referees closer together.”
For the record, he doesn’t look blobby close-up. He is fit, athletic and raring to go, and perhaps there is a lesson for Halsey here, too. “I have no issue with referees stepping away and taking roles in the media,” Madley says. “But talk about people’s decisions. As soon as you start getting personal about people’s body image, saying they don’t look fit enough and they are not preparing properly, that hurts because the guys writing it know how hard, physically, you have to train. That’s when ex-referees lose a bit of respect among current referees.”
He will have to come off Twitter soon because PGMOL contracts prohibit referees from having social media accounts. Initially, he will fly in and out for matches but the plan is to move back later in the year. At that point, we will not be hearing too much from Bobby Madley and, after so many headlines, he says he is looking forward to being anonymous again. Until he makes a mistake, anyway.
More than anything, though, he hopes his words might resonate if there are any other referees who are struggling to cope. “If I can give any advice to anyone, it would be simple,” he says. “Just talk — don’t bottle it up.” It is good advice. And perhaps it might also persuade the rest of us to be a little kinder, too.
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