Every time a referee makes a mistake in a big match, the same argument surfaces: given what they earn, they shouldn't be getting it wrong. Behind it lies an idea with serious economic grounding. If you pay someone well above what they would earn elsewhere, losing that job costs them dearly, they try harder, and the profession attracts the best candidates. Applied to refereeing, something straightforward should follow: the leagues that pay most should make fewer mistakes, and the wage rises of the last two decades should have shown up on the pitch.
The starting point is clear. Top-flight referees in Spain are the best-paid in the major European leagues, with earnings that exceed 250,000 euros a year when you add the base salary, match fees, VAR designations and image rights. Their Premier League counterparts, in a league that brings in considerably more than LaLiga, work within a clearly lower band. Germany, Italy and France fall below both.
If the hypothesis were true, Spain should have the most accurate refereeing in Europe. The problem is that there is no way of knowing.
The Premier League has had, for several seasons, an independent panel that reviews the key incidents of each matchday every week: penalties, red cards, goals disallowed or awarded. It is made up of five people, three of them former players or managers with no ties to the refereeing structure, and their conclusions are published. Thanks to this we know that, with VAR, English referees get around 96% of important decisions right, and we also know how many times the video system itself fails over the course of a season.
Nothing of the sort exists in Spain. The Technical Referees Committee assesses its officials through internal reports that determine promotions, demotions and sanctions, but those reports are not published and no one outside can scrutinise them. Occasionally, an official gives a global accuracy percentage at a press conference, without the underlying data that would allow it to be verified. In Germany, the league offers periodic press-conference summaries, but there is no independent panel that publishes its conclusions week by week; the most exhaustive measurement is carried out by a project run by fans and specialists who recalculate the standings by removing refereeing errors. France does not publish systematic data either.
In other words, the league that spends the most on its referees is one of those that allows the least scrutiny of what it gets in return. If a company doubled the salaries of a department and then refused to measure its results, nobody would call that an investment.
Even without comparable data across leagues, there is one way to approach the question: look at what happened over time. In England, elite referees have been full-time professionals since 2001, when the body that manages them was created. They spent nearly two decades earning professional salaries and the accuracy rate on key decisions was still hovering around 82% in the season before VAR arrived. The jump above 95% came with the screens, not the pay cheques. In Spain, the wage rises and the arrival of VAR coincided almost simultaneously, so it is impossible to attribute any improvement to the money.
That makes sense. A referee who earns twice as much does not see a millimetre-fine offside any better at 30 kilometres per hour, nor does he resolve with greater precision whether an arm was in a natural position. A large part of the rulebook depends on value judgements, and two equally well-prepared and well-paid referees can watch the same incident and decide differently without either having broken the rules. Cameras do resolve some of that, because they provide angles and replays that the human eye does not have.
This does not mean money serves no purpose. What a good salary buys is exclusive dedication. A referee who does not need a second job can spend the week training, analysing video, studying how the teams he is about to manage play, and looking after his physical condition so he does not arrive exhausted at the 85th minute. That improves performance indirectly, which is why it makes more sense to talk about investment in structure than in individual wages.
There is also a line of research that points in that direction. A study published in 2008 used the professionalisation of English refereeing as a natural experiment and found that referees, once professional, reduced their bias in favour of the home team in added time. Money did not give them better eyesight, but it does appear to have made them less susceptible to crowd pressure. That is an important nuance: incentives influence the decisions that can be chosen, not those that depend on perception.
And there is an effect working in the opposite direction. The more a referee earns, the more his salary is used as a weapon after every mistake, and the greater his incentive to avoid committing on the pitch and let the video room decide. A high salary without a credible evaluation system does not generate trust: it generates suspicion.
That is why the question of whether paying more reduces errors has an uncomfortable answer for Spanish football. What reduced errors was technology. What makes money useful is the time it frees up for preparation. And what turns that spending into trust is being able to measure it from the outside. The Premier pays less and shows its workings every week. LaLiga pays more and asks people to believe what it does not show.
