What could the compliment be?
Dear FAI
You’re not the worst run organisation in the world.
Regards
FIFA
What’s the betting we’ll see John Delaney and a few of his cohorts as FIFA’s guests of honour at the World Cup final?
Bump
Meanwhile John Delaney was trousering €5 million on the QT for the FAI. 
Finding Martin Hansson, the Henry handball referee…
By Daniel Taylor 4h ago
37 
It is not easy finding Martin Hansson but, then again, that is probably how he likes it.
A flight to Copenhagen, a train over the Denmark-Sweden border, through Malmo and Kristianstad into Ronneby, and then the final leg of the journey on roads so secluded it is possible to drive for half an hour without seeing another car.
Holmsjo, set among the lakes of Blekinge county, has only a smattering of houses, many of which are completely concealed within the pine forests and autumnal scenery. Hansson’s farmhouse is one such hideaway and it isn’t straightforward, as an outsider, asking the villagers for directions.
One is walking with a pushchair when I wind down the window to ask if she knows where I should be heading.
“Yes,” she replies, with a polite smile. “But…”
The awkward silence makes it clear she is unsure, to say the least, why an Englishman in a hire car might want this information.
It is the first insight into what it has been like for Hansson since that seminal night in 2009, refereeing a World Cup qualification play-off between France and the Republic of Ireland, when his entire world changed. And in its own way, it is quite impressive. The people of Holmsjo have got his back.
Half an hour later, I am bumping along a narrow track running through woodland until, after nearly half a mile of nothing but soaring trees and the occasional log pile, it eventually opens out into a picture-book Scandinavian setting.
The farmhouse has red wooden panels and white trimmings, like something out of an Astrid Lindgren story. The outbuildings are the same deep shade of red and filled with logs of tremendous size. There is a wooden sign saying “Valkommen” and when the doorbell chimes — the relief! — it brings a friendly welcome.
Tim, a black labrador, gets there first and is far too chummy to be described as a guard dog. Hege holds out a hand to introduce herself and very soon the coffee machine is gurgling into action. “The people in the village are very protective of Martin,” she explains. “Everything was very bad for a while. We had to be given secret numbers because there were threats. So the people here remember what happened.”
Hege — or Hege Steinlund — used to be a full-time assistant referee in Norway and has officiated at two Olympic Games. She also happens to be Hansson’s wife and, in the nicest possible way, it feels apt that he has made his life with someone from the same profession. Someone who understands how brutal football can be sometimes. And what it is like to live with that permanent risk: that one mistake can change everything.
In Hansson’s case, that will always come back to the now-infamous night in Paris when France qualified for the 2010 World Cup at Ireland’s expense and Thierry Henry, with a blatant handball before the decisive goal, provided a moment to rank alongside Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ against England in the 1986 finals.
It was a piece of opportunism — cheating, snideness, call it what you will — that provoked reaction as high as up as the Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Irish justice minister, Dermot Ahern. It put Henry high up on in Time magazine’s List of Sporting Cheats and was a reminder, perhaps, that even the greatest footballers can be tempted sometimes to play with the soul of a pickpocket.
It left Hansson with something no referee ever wants: notoriety. It shattered his career. It made him a hate figure and, football being the sport it is, he will always be a familiar name for students of refereeing demonology.
The owner of this remote farmhouse is also Exhibit A when it comes to the reasons why football now exists in a VAR world, and why there is an extra official behind each goal-line for Champions League ties and many international matches.
Hansson’s failure to see Henry’s deception provided one of those rare moments in football that genuinely changed the sport. It is what has brought me to Sweden: to find out what he makes of football’s age of technology and to get a better understanding of what it has been like for him ever since, living with the knowledge that he will always be remembered for the wrong reasons.
He does not need reminding of the date of the 10th anniversary.
November 18, 2009. It’s just gone 11.30pm and, in the bowels of the Stade de France, three men are embracing and high-fiving. Martin Hansson and his assistants, Fredrik Nilsson and Stefan Wittberg, have retreated to the referees’ room. The game has finished 1-1 after extra time. France have qualified for the World Cup, having won the first leg 1-0 four days earlier in Dublin, and the officials have come together for a group hug.
“It was something we did before, and after, every game,” Hansson tells The Athletic . “When I went into that room I really thought it was one of the best games of my career. It’s not so often, as a referee, you look forward to extra-time but, for this game, that was how I felt. I was in a good point of my career. I had refereed the Confederations Cup final earlier in the year. I really thought I had had a good game.”
In the Ireland dressing room, it is an entirely different scene. Boots are thrown in anger. Shin-pads and drinks are lashed against the walls. At least one player is sobbing, but mostly it is sheer, undiminished rage.
The fury of Giovanni Trapattoni, the Ireland manager, comes half in Italian, half in broken English. “It has been a fucking murder,” he is shouting, over and again.
A shout goes up for “Brian, get the fucking match on” and Brian McCarthy, the team’s video analyst, puts the footage straight to that moment, with 103 minutes gone, when a free-kick ball 40 yards out is clipped into the Irish penalty area by Florent Malouda.
Henry has jutted out his left hand to bring the ball under control — not just once, but twice. William Gallas is waiting in the middle and heads Henry’s pass into the net for the game’s decisive moment. Watching it back, the anger of the Irish players is fired up several notches again. Trapattoni and his players know for absolute certain they have been cheated out of the World Cup.
It was a scene that Shay Given, Ireland’s goalkeeper that night, remembers as “carnage … as angry a dressing-room as I’ve ever been in”.
For Hansson, there was no television and, to begin with, no real sense of alarm. He and his assistants had been taken aback by the anger of the Irish protests. But they put that down to the emotion of the night and Hansson was satisfied he had a clear view of the Gallas header. “I was quite sure that the guy who scored the goal used his head or his shoulder,” he tells me, trying to offer some form of explanation. “This was no handball.”
Kilbane and Andrews were already appealing as Gallas scored (Photo: Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
What he didn’t realise — because he hadn’t seen it — was the handball had come from the player creating the goal, not the one scoring it. And he remained oblivious to that fact, congratulating himself on a job well done, until FIFA’s referee observer knocked on the door.
“He said that he was sorry but he had to tell us it was a very deliberate handball for the goal,” Hansson says. “I couldn’t even think straight. ‘But I saw the goal and it was his head or at least his shoulder,’ I said. I had no idea. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘it’s not that situation, it’s the situation before.’”
And then?
Hansson “broke down completely”.
He was still in tears, utterly inconsolable, when one of the Football Association of Ireland officials — he never got his name — knocked on the door. “We knew by that stage, of course. We knew what it meant for Ireland and we also knew that, for us (his refereeing team), the World Cup in South Africa didn’t exist any more. He wanted to shake our hands. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, “of course it is a mistake but we blame the player, we don’t blame you. It’s big, big cheating from the player.’ That was unbelievably good of him.”
Not that there was such a forgiving mood in the Ireland dressing room, where there were all sorts of wild and aggrieved theories being concocted about the reasons why Henry had been allowed to get away with it.
Captain Robbie Keane, in one radio interview, suggested FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his UEFA counterpart, Michel Platini, were “probably clapping hands, Platini sitting up there on the phone to Sepp Blatter, probably texting each other, delighted with the result”, knowing that the bigger footballing nation had got through to the finals.
Henry, according to Keane, had “almost caught the ball and walked into the net with it”.
Damien Duff, booked amid furious Irish protests, claimed it was all a conspiracy. “FIFA want the big teams in the World Cup. They want France in the World Cup and — it may sound silly — they want teams sponsored by Adidas. Adidas sponsor the World Cup and they sponsor France.”
Duff forgot, perhaps, that he had his own deal with Adidas, and later had to apologise to his sponsor.
Given’s view, a decade on, is that, “VAR would have ruled it out — one million per cent. It would have been a yellow card for Henry and a free-kick for Ireland. And that’s what VAR should be for: the big decisions, not to decide whether Sheffield United’s forward is a fraction ahead of a Tottenham defender.”
Except, of course, there was no such thing as VAR back then. And perhaps Hansson was a victim of that, too.
“It could never happen now,” he says. “Not just because of VAR but also because, within half a year, they appointed the additional assistant referees behind the goals. It was (the Henry incident) that meant them starting that project.”
For the first time, there is a flicker of anger in his voice.
“Of course, if we had the technology in place back then it would have been better for everyone. But what I would really like to ask is: where is the discussion about players cheating?
“It’s not a very big discussion, is it? If the referee makes a mistake, the television company wants to speak to the referee to ask what happened. The referee has to come out and say, ‘Oh, it was a big mistake, I thought it was a penalty and I was wrong.’ Or in my case, that I couldn’t see the handball because I was blocked from the player.
“Never, though, will they put a big star in front of the cameras and ask, ‘Can you please watch this screen here? You are obviously cheating, so what are you wanting to say about that, hey?’ I have never heard that question.”
Rattskiparen, Mattias Low’s 2010 documentary (translation: The Referee), offers probably the best insight into Hansson’s obsession with refereeing.
It is the story of a football-mad boy who refereed his first match at the age of 15, passed his FIFA badges before turning 30 and had made it his ambition to officiate in the 2010 World Cup.
But it is not always an easy watch, particularly when it comes to Hansson’s personal life, as a father of two young boys, and the details of how this obsession led to the breakdown of his first marriage.
At one point he admits that his family came “lastly” in his priorities. “I had to choose between family, football and work. Football always comes first. A match with short notice is always the priority. In this sense, I do feel guilty towards my family and kids.”
His fractious relationship with Aftonbladet and Expressen, two of Sweden’s bigger newspapers, is also covered, including one post-match scene when he clashes with their reporters (“you represent a horrible form of journalism”). Low explains that Hansson has been “persecuted for years” by the Swedish media. And we are introduced to Hansson’s mother, Birgit, who is flicking through some of the newspaper cuttings. “Unfortunately,” she says, “I read all the things that they write about him.”
Birgit also lives in Holmsjo and has found out, the hard way, what it is like to see her son receive death threats. “When people write or say that if they meet him on the street they will kill him,” she says, “to hear that as a mother is horrible. At some point the family had to leave to an unnamed place for a week. The threats were too serious. We (his parents) had no idea where they were for a whole week.”
For Hansson, it is not easy to be reminded about this part of the documentary. “My sons were nine and 11 at the time. They had no idea I had been threatened. For them, I was just their father and a football referee, not the kind of person who would ever be threatened.
“If I had known this was coming out in the documentary, I would have stopped it immediately. We had an agreement that I would see everything first and that if I said no to anything they would respect that and cut it out. Instead, in the copy that was given to me, I remember this part was not in it. My sons, they took it very hard. Big trouble…”
Hansson had been officiating matches in Sweden to the regular soundtrack of “Martin Hansson! A whore! A whore!” even before it felt as though the entire sporting world was rubbernecking in his direction.
For the first few nights, Hansson barely slept. He watched the DVD more times than he could remember and came to the conclusion that, with so many bodies in the penalty area, the only place he would have had a clear view from was behind the goal. But that didn’t change a thing: he had missed it. “It was the worst performance of my career,” he says.
That period of his life can feel like a blur now. He flew to Stockholm after the match and, when he made it back to Holmsjo a few days later, he could tell how many journalists had been to the village because of the notes and calling cards stuck to his front door.
His elderly neighbours, he says, were woken in the night by people knocking on the door. Arsene Wenger — who probably should have known better — described him as “incompetent or dishonest, so I prefer that he is incompetent”. And then the political arguments started about whether the game should be played again. FIFA called an emergency general meeting. Even Henry said the fairest solution would be to arrange a replay.
Hansson was recently divorced, and returned to an empty house. “I’m just grateful that I had very good friends during that time,” he says. “I had a lot of support. Referees from all over Europe were texting me. Many more than I would ever have thought.”
It is not easy to imagine how he coped with the public stigma of being held responsible. Yet the word ‘tragedy’ can be over-used in sport and, if nothing else, it was a lesson for him perhaps that family, not football, should come first.
“The same night this happened, there was a car accident close to this area,” he says. “Some young people died. Sometimes football is very, very big but then, at other times, football can feel very, very small.”
A lot has changed in the last 10 years. Premier League crowds now chant “V-A-R.” Players draw rectangular signs with their fingers and implore referees to make urgent contact with whoever is in their earpieces. Television monitors are positioned pitchside. And, perhaps not realising the irony, the current Republic of Ireland manager, Mick McCarthy, declared last week that VAR was ruining football.
It is certainly too late for the Ireland players who missed out on South Africa 2010 and took only a small amount of schadenfreude from the fact France went on to have such a poor tournament.
Apart from Glenn Whelan, all the players in Ireland’s starting XI that night in Paris are now off the scene. Given, Keane, Duff and Kevin Kilbane will have to make do with their memories from the 2002 World Cup. Richard Dunne was also selected for that tournament in the Far East, though never made an appearance (Henry sat beside Dunne after the final whistle in Paris and admitted it was handball). But John O’Shea, Sean St Ledger, Liam Lawrence, Keith Andrews and Kevin Doyle will never experience a World Cup and the same goes for the three substitutes — Paul McShane, Aidan McGeady and Darron Gibson — who also suffered on the pitch that night. It cost Irish football an estimated £27 million and made France even more. But what price the prestige for the players?
“It was a catastrophe for Ireland,” Hansson says. “They were so close to the World Cup, and it’s such a big thing. Fantastic people, too.”
The strange thing, perhaps, is that most of those players seem to hold more of a grudge against Hansson than the man who is surely the real offender here.
Thierry Henry, superstar.
“I did a Q&A with Thierry Henry a few years ago in London and there was a question on it (the handball),” Given recalls. “He didn’t really want to answer. To be fair to him, not many players would have said they had done it and told the referee. I remember Robbie Fowler once doing that with David Seaman (in a Liverpool game at Arsenal in 1997) and saying it wasn’t a penalty, but there’s not many.
“My gripe is more with the officials. All right, the ref can have his vision blocked and might not see things clearly, but the linesman was in line and there was nothing blocking his view. He was literally looking across at it.”
Not that Given is so forgiving towards Henry in his autobiography. “We shook hands and said hello and, although everything was very polite, there was definitely an elephant in the room,” he writes. “A fucking big elephant called the 2010 World Cup.”
Kilbane, whose 14 years as an Ireland international brought him 110 caps, had his own chance encounter with Henry outside Marylebone station in London a few years ago. Henry, then at Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls, was hoping to arrange a loan spell back at Arsenal. The two men had a polite chat but the awkwardness of the World Cup was never mentioned. Kilbane decided against bringing it up “much to the disappointment of the mate I was with, who was hoping for a punch-up or at least a public confrontation”.
As for Hansson, nobody should be surprised that he gave serious consideration to quitting football during the period when the headlines — “Le Hand of God”, “French Nickers”, “Hand Gaul!” and on and on — offered only a small insight into the unpleasantness that engulfed his life.
In the end, he decided to stick it out, as did his assistants, even though the view in Aftonbladet was “that Team Hansson has forfeited its right to continue to take charge of major international matches … anything else would be a further insult to the Irish nation”.
Then, a few months later, a letter arrived from FIFA headquarters in Switzerland. It was the list of referees who had been selected to go to the World Cup and it told him, to his considerable surprise, that he had been selected to go to South Africa, after all.
Hansson (left) walks out for the 2010 World Cup last-16 match between Brazil and Chile with referee Howard Webb and assistant Mike Mullarkey. (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
His response — “I drank champagne” — provoked more hostility in Ireland but it turned out that FIFA was not entirely willing to overlook the trauma of Paris. Hansson never actually got on the pitch at the tournament. Demoted to the role of fourth official, he was the only referee of those selected from Europe not to be awarded a game at the finals.
His friends — among them former Premier League referee Howard Webb — say he was never the same referee again. The whole ordeal put him in a “dark” place. In October 2013, he announced he was retiring from refereeing and, though he continued for another year or so, he will admit now the experience had taken its toll. “I was tired of the travelling,” he says. “I needed some years to have a think a little bit.”
The commonly told story is that he was so soured by his experiences he turned his back on the sport for good. But that was never the case and here’s a little exclusive for The Athletic : Hansson now has a role as one of UEFA’s observers, watching games from the stands rather than out in the middle.
Hansson, in other words, is paid to instruct other match officials about how they have performed and what they could do better. He tries, he says, to pass on his experience, preaching old-fashioned values, but he has also learned that “today’s referees read everything about themselves”.
Nor is that his only frustration. “They try to be friends with the players because they seem to think that is the way to get the players’ respect,” he says. “It’s much better to be respected because you are a good referee. You don’t have to be enemies, but don’t slap each other on the shoulders. Anders Frisk, Markus Merk, that generation, they didn’t care if they were friends with the players.”
He is currently in Belgium at an Under-19 tournament. Last month, it was Denmark versus Northern Ireland in a qualifying match for the European Under-21 Championship. Before that, there were Europa League qualifiers in Croatia, Estonia and Luxembourg.
There are other dates in his diary and even the possibility, if someone behind the scenes at UEFA is feeling particularly mischievous, that Hansson will get an assignment one day in Ireland or France.
What would he say, I ask, if he ever met Henry again?
“I won’t speak with him.”
Yet there is no malice in his voice and he has been happier to talk than perhaps I had anticipated when I set off on the journey to Holmsjo.
Hansson, it turns out, has also been offered a small fortune to appear in a television advertisement in Ireland, sending himself up as having poor eyesight and trying to make light of what happened.
It sounds like a classic “Should have gone to Specsavers” storyline, or something dreamt up by bookmakers Paddy Power, perhaps. Either way, Hansson politely declined the offer, taking the decision that it was better to keep a low profile. “Some referees are very happy to be in the media all the time and, in my opinion, they lose respect,” he says.
Nor is he tempted to turn his experiences into a book. “He is not the kind of person who wants publicity,” Hege explains. “In Sweden, people respect him for that. He does not go after fame, even when he could make a lot of money from it.”
And, besides, they prefer the quiet life. Their farm is set over considerable acreage. They have a boat to go out on Sillhovden, the nearest lake. When they lift the outdoor decking, it reveals a swimming pool. Every summer they bring in cows to graze the surrounding land. It is a good life.
Hansson also works as a firefighter in Karlskrona, the nearest city, and I come away with the impression of a decent man who, despite everything, has tried to retain a sense of humour and perspective.
Hansson feels Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger’s wrath during a Champions League last 16 tie against Porto in February 2010. (Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
His dog Tim, he says, needs to learn to be a bit more ferocious — “he is a friend of journalists, he does not do his duties” — and, sure, there are plenty of people from my industry who might not be quite so welcome at his table. But he seems comfortable in his own skin and it is easy to understand why the fresh air in Holmsjo, in a part of the country known as The Garden of Sweden, has therapeutic qualities.
“When I was refereeing it used to give me so much energy to come home and find this quietness,” he says. “It’s a big difference between the big stadiums and then coming back to Sillhovden. It’s very powerful. I would say it is the most beautiful place in the world.”
They strike me as a normal and likeable couple. Hege wants to apologise in case the coffee isn’t quite right. Her husband is happy because Sweden have beaten Romania to qualify for Euro 2020, but saddened to hear that one of their players, Alexander Isak, was racially abused in the process.
He has even set up a Facebook account in the last couple of years (not to be confused with the “Martin Hansson is a Wanker” public account). A small thing, perhaps, but it would have been unimaginable a few years ago and it is another sign that some kind of normality has re-entered his life.
His youngest son, now 19, is already officiating youth games and Hansson proudly makes the point that “because of myself and my wife, he must be the most educated young referee in the world”.
All of which leaves an obvious question: will his son take up refereeing as a profession?
There is a long pause.
“I think he will play football,” Hansson says. “It’s not so easy to be a referee with Hansson as a surname.”
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I’m growing very tired of these formulaic articles from The Athletic.
A poor referee so traumatised he had to retire 4 years later and become a referee’s observer. I don’t think there was much of a witch-hunt against him and I doubt it impacted him too much. Of course he was downgraded a little, but that was because he made an error. It’s hardly that unjust or traumatic.
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I’ve let my sub go, lot of same ol same old
This was the start of their big feature article on Saturday about Jamie Vardy. It’s worse than tabloid standard. They just find someone to give them a quote and try and piece that together into an article, even if the quote is really mundane.
Jamie Vardy is a “handful” — and not just for the Premier League defenders he continues to terrorise.
The Leicester City striker can also present a challenge for his coaches at Belvoir Drive with his endless energy and mischief, as former team-mate and coach Kevin Phillips can testify.
One of Vardy’s favourite pre-training rituals, when Phillips was a first-team coach under manager Nigel Pearson, was to smash the carefully gathered balls all over the training ground.
“We got fed up of trying to tell him, ‘Jamie, leave the balls alone’,” Phillips, 46, recalls. “In the end, I think we never even put the balls out. We used to leave them in the bag but then that wouldn’t stop him because he would come over and get one out, take a touch, and then volley it miles away. But you get used to it!
“That is just the way he is. I guarantee he will be no different now. You kind of turn a blind eye sometimes to things like that from your star player when he is performing every week. Believe me, even (other) players won’t say anything because I know they will think exactly the same.”
Phillips took Vardy under his wing when he retired at Leicester aged 40, ending an illustrious career that spanned 20 years with nine clubs, 660 senior appearances, 282 goals and eight England caps…
The US stuff is better in fairness but the soccer coverage can be really poor.
There’s only so many articles you can write about interesting stuff. They hired every football journalist in the UK as well so it must be hard to find something new for all of them