Who’d Be a Top-Class Rugby Referee / Telegraph Magazine
Wayne Barnes meets me in the plush, muffled eighth-floor office of the top City law firm where he works as a criminal barrister: offices which offer the starkest possible contrast to the muddy pitches in huge stadia packed with roaring rugby fans where he has spent so many of his Saturdays over the past two decades. And today his tall, slim frame is clothed not in his customary referee’s kit, but in a tailored dark blue suit and crisp white shirt with cufflinks.
There is one question above all that I wish to explore with him, which is this: why would any sane person want to be a top-flight rugby referee?
Why would anyone want to take charge of what he himself describes, in a new autobiography entitled Throwing the Book, as “organised mayhem”, a fast-moving game of fiendishly complex rules, knowing that one wrong call could not only wreck the entire match but incur the wrath - or worse - of 80,000 fired-up fans in the seething cauldron of that stadium plus millions more watching live on television. There is no glory to be had: for a rugby referee, the definition of “success” is to finish the match unnoticed.
“It’s a good question,” Barnes laughs when I put it to him, and it is a particularly pertinent one because not long before our interview he had refereed rugby’s ultimate showpiece, the World Cup Final between South Africa and New Zealand in Paris, and suffered the consequences.
The match was Barnes’s last before his retirement at the age of 44. It should by rights have crowned a glorious refereeing career. In the event he red-carded Sam Cane, the All Blacks captain, who became the first player ever to be sent off in a final. He sin-binned three other players including Siya Kolisi, the South African captain, and disallowed a try by New Zealand’s Aaron Smith for a knock-on a few moves earlier. The Springboks won by a solitary point, 12-11.
Barnes defends all those decisions, which were made with the help of the television match official (TMO). He says his assistant referees and managers have since reviewed and endorsed them. He adds that Cane, Smith and the other New Zealand players thanked him very graciously after the game and made no complaints. Most independent commentators thought he had a good match, and World Rugby has described his team’s performance as “outstanding”.
But the social media abuse began almost immediately. “There were threats of violence, threats against the kids, threats against Polly (his wife), against me,” Barnes says. The messages, which ran into double figures, declared: “We will burn your house down. We will slit your throat. We know where your kids are.” There were threats of sexual violence.
Polly posted a private message on Instagram which was leaked to the press. “What a vile atmosphere at the Stade de France. It’s just a game k***heads,” she wrote. “See ya later Rugby World Cup. Won’t miss you, or the death threats.”
Barnes reported the abuse to the police. World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, has employed a data science company to try and trace the senders. “I guess as a referee you get used to it, but you shouldn’t have to get used to it,” Barnes says. “But when people take it to the next level of making threats of violence against your wife and kids, it’s like ‘how can you even think that’s right?’.”
The abuse was offset by the many messages of support that he received from players and coaches around the globe, but it was a sad way for a man who had risen from the humblest of backgrounds to become the world’s top referee to bow out.
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Barnes was raised on a council estate in Bream, an old mining village in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. His father was a lorry driver, his mother worked in a snooker club, and his parents separated when he was still young. He went to the local comprehensive from which his older brother was expelled for throwing a desk at the deputy headmaster.
The family did not have much money. Barnes was 13 before he first visited London, and 20 before he flew in a plane. But he did have rugby, and he started playing when he was six though he was, by his own admission, “crap”.
When he was 15 he injured his knee. A friend of his father suggested he tried refereeing instead. His first game was Bream Third XV versus the Berry Hill Wappers, an event he describes as “30 men running around telling me what to do”.
Despite that he found he enjoyed the “theatricality” of the job (he had also been appearing in local pantomimes since he was seven), and the fact that he was given £5 and a few beers afterwards. He won a scholarship to do his ‘A’ levels at a nearby public school, Monmouth, but continued refereeing at weekends.
He went on to the University of East Anglia to study law, having been inspired by a visit to a magistrate’s court when he was 14. There he played rugby every Wednesday and refereed every weekend.
By the age of 21, while simultaneously embarking on his legal career, he was on the panel of England’s top 50 referees. Three years after that he refereed his first Premier League game, Bath against Rotherham, where he had to cope with a streaker and a fan collapsing in a stand.
At 25, he became England’s youngest ever full-time elite referee and found himself yellow-carding Martin Johnson, who had recently won the World Cup as England’s captain. “I’m sorry, Sir,” he muttered. “That’s the only f***ing decision you’ve got right so far,” the rugby Colossus retorted as he left the pitch.
Over the subsequent two decades Barnes broke records galore. He refereed 111 international matches and officiated at no fewer than 17 Six Nations tournaments and five World Cups - more than anyone else in history. He took charge of 273 Premier League matches, ten Premiership finals and three European Champions Cup finals.
He refereed the longest ever test match, France against Wales in the 2017 Six Nations, which overran by a full 20 minutes amid a welter of penalties, dubious substitutions and an alleged biting.
He was the first referee to send a player off in a Premiership Final at Twickenham - Northampton’s captain Dylan Hartley. In another match he sent Gloucester’s Nick Wood off after 73 seconds, which was the second fastest red-card in Premiership history. He once refereed an entire game - London French against Kilburn Cosmos - without awarding a single penalty and won the Man of the Match award.
In all that time he has used just one whistle (“it gets cleaned now and again to get rid of the mucus”, he chuckles), and one coin for tossing up (a penny bearing Queen Victoria’s face).
He has prospered by dint of meticulous preparation, a willingness to explain his decisions and an ability to win the players’ trust. Before every match he would read a piece of paper bearing the words ‘You are not here to be popular’, and write ‘Reset’ on his hand to remind him not to let unexpected incidents during the game cloud his judgement.
Not surprisingly, Barnes waxes lyrical about how rugby has enabled him to travel to every continent, meet extraordinary people, make wonderful friends, have amazing experiences and watch some of the world’s greatest sportsmen performing in front of his eyes. He has frequently had to “pinch” himself, he says. He has suffered from “imposter syndrome”. His autobiography’s dust cover calls the book a “love letter” to the sport that has given him so much, but it’s certainly not an uncritical one.
Its pages chart, for example, the rising abuse of referees, sometimes triggered by international coaches and amplified by social media.
In 2007, for example, he missed a crucial forward pass as France narrowly beat the All Blacks in a World Cup quarter-final in Cardiff. Messages appeared on social media, then in its infancy, declaring ‘Wayne Barnes Must Die’. He was voted the third-most hated man in New Zealand after Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. His effigy was burned in Christchurch and another was placed in a urinal in Queenstown. A few years later Graham Henry, the All Blacks coach, all but accused him of match fixing in a memoir.
In 2022 he refereed as France defeated South Africa 30-26. Rassie Erasmus, the Springboks' coach, then posted videos on social media of decisions he thought Barnes had got wrong. In no time he and Polly started receiving threatening messages like those he received after October’s World Cup final. Barnes called Erasmus’s conduct “unforgivable” and said he “felt like quitting on the spot”. His wife’s “anger and upset made me wonder why I was doing a job that was bringing misery and pain to my family”.
At a subsequent England v. South Africa game at Twickenham Barnes felt obliged to cancel a proposed half-time appearance to celebrate his 100th test match lest his family heard “a horrible comment about their dad or husband from a disgruntled South African fan”. He cites other instances of him being besieged in the locker room, or being smuggled out of a stadium in an ambulance, or being assailed by irate fans in bars.
Barnes is now pressing for governments, tech companies and rugby authorities to take much tougher action to identify and punish those who venture beyond legitimate criticism into outright abuse and threatening behaviour. He says coaches who incite such abuse should be sanctioned.
But there are other aspects of the modern game that he dislikes. He approves of TMOs provided they do not intervene too frequently, saying that action replays make the ref’s life much easier. He likewise approves of referees having microphones so they can explain their decisions to players and spectators.
But he says referees are constantly caught between their desire to keep the game flowing so it is more entertaining, and knowing that they will be berated by coaches, and marked down by their assessors, if they fail to award penalties for every offence. “What are we trying to achieve?,” he writes in the book. “Do we refs want to get every detail right, or do we want to make the sport as popular as possible by giving fans what they want, which is a fast-flowing game?”
He complains that bodies like World Rugby have not always supported referees when they are under fire. He believes referees are “undervalued” and underpaid “given the scrutiny they’re under and the abuse they get”: he will not say what he earns but it is “half what an average Premiership player gets”. He complains that referees get far too little notice of where they will be refereeing the following week, or the following month, “so your summer holidays can’t be planned, your anniversaries, your birthdays, your friends”.
He seems particularly annoyed by former referees appearing on live television commentary teams and criticising refereeing decisions. “It always amazes me that people who know how hard the job is criticise what we do,” he says pointedly.
All of which brings me back to my original question: why would anyone want to be a top-flight rugby referee? Barnes never gives me a proper answer beyond saying: “I love the role. I love the challenge.” He does admit, though, that referees tend to be “a bit different” and that he might “have a screw loose”.
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Barnes has now given his red and yellow cards to his six-year-old son, Beau. “He’s running around the house giving his sister (Juno, aged nine) red or yellow cards,” he laughs. All the other mementoes of his long career - the photographs, framed shirts, caps, match balls - have been consigned to the attic of his home in Twickenham. “All my memories are in my mind,” he says.
He is excited about spending more time at home. Refereeing “becomes a burden on the family,” he says. “The sacrifices the kids and Polly have made for me being away have put a huge amount of pressure on them.” Besides raising the children, Polly, whom he first met at school in Bream, is a sports marketing executive and co-founder of the Women’s Rugby Association.
He is also excited about working full-time for his law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, where he is a partner and defends corporations and individuals being investigated for possible white collar crimes.
Until now he has had to juggle his two careers, fitting in his legal work between training at Twickenham every Monday and Tuesday and long trips to places like New Zealand, Australia, Argentina or South Africa. During this autumn’s World Cup in France, while most of the other referees relaxed, he worked in his firm’s Paris office every Wednesday.
He is adamant that he has not been driven to retire by the abuse: he says he would have retired after the 2019 World Cup had he refereed the final, as he was slated to do, but in the event he was unable to do so because England was one of the teams involved.
He is equally adamant that he will never referee again, though he admits he will miss the excitement and adrenaline rush. “If you could zap me in and out and give me a tablet that means I don’t have to do all the fitness work I’d probably keep on doing it,” he says.
But he will continue to fight for the rights and interests of referees. In 2022 he and others launched the International Rugby Match Officials organisation to support them on- and off-the-field, and to give them a voice within the sport’s decision-making bodies.
Barnes wants referees to have ready access to psychologists and counsellors, for example. “We all know that men are pretty average at talking about their own feelings and mental health, so in one of the most pressured environments I can imagine, standing in front of 80,000 people, to have someone to discuss that with is invaluable,” he argues.
He will also play rugby again - back in Bream where it all began. For the past decade he has organised an annual charity match there, importing former professionals and raising roughly £150,000 for breast cancer research. “You can guarantee the ball will be kicked straight to me from the kickoff, and everyone will try to smack me,” he laughs. And now he will no longer be able to send them off.