NEW YORK – This past Tuesday, the Professional Referee Organization (PRO) and the Professional Soccer Referees Association (PSRA) ratified a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). With that, PRO referees, the regular refs are back this weekend in MLS. Scabby The Ref is gone.
The MLS season started with a PRO referee protest/lockout as negotiations broke down in the new year. That prompted MLS to bring in replacement refs, or Scabby The Ref as MLS fans dubbed it.
Scabby was not great. A DJ gave an LA Galaxy player a red card on a play that was actually a dive against Inter Miami. There was that wrongly called throw in for Sporting KC. Then the end of the Colorado Rapids Houston Dynamo game, among others.
VAR was able to correct numerous calls. But fundamentally, the replacement referees just did not get calls right from the run of play, officiating games at MLS speed. Now the regular refs are back and the new competitive rules (time wasting and gamesmanship) will be implemented in short order.
Surely MLS fans will still boo the refs this match weekend. There will be calls fans don’t like. Twitter can go back to being mad at Ted Unkel instead of Scabby, as it was always meant to be.
Rapids fans did express their opinions throughout the entire lockout. At the home opener, Centennial 38 fans held up signs in solidarity with the referees. Scabby The Ref will still be a fun meme for people to bring up now and again. Hopefully the experience the scabs got will help them develop into competent full-time MLS referees someday.
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Brian Jennings