"It's got worse." This was the appraisal of a downtrodden Martin Ho after Tottenham Hotspur's 2-1 defeat to local rivals Arsenal, an appraisal aimed with no spared ambiguity at the collection of white-and-black striped referees providing the Women's Super League with its ultimate contour.
In the eyes of Ho and others, the second-half penalty awarded Arsenal then converted by Alessia Russo to earn an eventual 2-1 victory shouldn't have been awarded at all. Their basis was that Elizabeth Tandberg's clearance in the box inadvertently struck the arm of her teammate Ella Morris, which the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the independent guardian of football rules, says isn't a handball offence as of this season.
Referee Phoebe Cross — one of five officials to be promoted this season to the WSL and WSL2 by Pro Ref, the official body overseeing match officials across English professional football — gave it anyway. The latest mistake in a swarm of them, the undiagnosed epidemic sweeping across elite women's football.
Raging against referees isn't new.
Claiming an erroneous call as a personally unique affliction is the prerogative of any manager. Writing about refereeing is tedious. But Ho, in a sense, isn't wrong. Type in "WSL refereeing" in Google Trends and the frequency of spikes visibly increases over the years, corresponding with headline controversies, like: Manchester City's Controversial Double Sending Off Against Chelsea (October 2024); Renee Slegers' "We Need Justice" against Chelsea (November 2025); Sam Kerr's Wrongly Disallowed Hat-Trick (April 2026); Crystal Palace's Surprise (and Illegal) Fourth Substitution Window (September 2026); Ho's "It's Got Worse" (October 2026).
Each triggered their own state of emergency for officiating. Yet, what's worsened in the years of women's football's exponential growth since the WSL went full-time in 2018 is more complex. Amid the mushrooming player wages and squad depth and investment, increased visibility and scrutiny and real-time consequences (financial, sporting, the longevity of a manager in post), it is not the decisions made on the pitch but the lack of proportional full-time resourcing and education for those responsible for making them. What remains is a gulf, one growing bigger and more noticeable as the rest of the game propels upwards.
Being a WSL or WSL2 referee is not a full-time job.
Officials are paid by match fees, with most having full or part-time employment outside of officiating. Match fees have increased over the years as the game has gotten bigger, but officials do not operate on a base salary as those in the Premier League do. Goal-line technology is also not available in the WSL, nor is VAR.
Even so, investment into women's football officiating is higher than it's ever been before. At a recent WSL shareholders' meeting, Premier League, EFL, FA and WSL Football agreed that getting officiating professionalised was a necessity, agreeing to pump more funds over the next three years into Pro Ref with the hope of reaching full-time employment and building a competent development pipeline for officials. WSL Football's investment into the initiative has doubled.
There's scope for all of this to move quicker, subject to the necessary financial, operational and group readiness. Education, training and stable infrastructure require time to ensure mistakes are avoided and officials are adequately prepared.
The limited number of elite matches available to train officials to a high enough standard without errors is an ongoing challenge, something UEFA hopes to address with its revamped Champions League group stage format. Pro Ref are using this to their advantage.
Thirteen match officials from the Women's Professional Game Group are on the FIFA List for 2026 and receiving appointments across European and international competitions to earn further opportunities to develop their experience at the game's highest levels. Such experience is bearing fruit. To start the 2026-27 season, five officials earned promotions through the Pro Ref pathway to WSL and WSL2.
Being told to be OK with gradual evolution can feel cynical, even indifferent, given the stakes.
While Russo's 54th-minute penalty didn't signal a dead end for Spurs – 36 minutes remained to manage something – context is important.
In Spurs' 13 WSL North London derbies, they've won one and drawn twice. Heading into Saturday's derby, Spurs sat fourth in the table, a once-inconceivable four points and four spots ahead of Arsenal toiling on an unprecedented five-match winless run. Pressure mounted on head coach Renee Slegers. The second year of Ho's Spurs Project turns on getting results against teams who've historically sat above them. In the end, Arsenal's winless run was halted. Spurs' run was extended to three successive league defeats, with Spurs now zero for three against teams sat above them.
Like it or not, refereeing decisions carry more ramifications in a league with increasingly more visibility and value. Clubs are pumping money in. The window for players to prove their worth is shrinking, the pressure to perform mounting. Coaches are finding the guillotine falls faster not only on them but on the funding of the project itself if results go awry.
Referees will never be perfect, but getting them as close to that point as possible can be the difference between standing on a touchline and not.
Naturally, in these moments, we bay for someone to blame: WSL Football, the FA, the Premier League, Pro Ref, the system, the banning of women's football 50 years ago, the decades of underinvestment, maltreatment, negligence.
It's easier this way, as opposed to the mental pilgrimage of considering the nuances, the fact that growth is rarely linear and hardly ubiquitous and English women's football still sits in uncharted territory. How do you grow while keeping a sustainable cap on this thing? How do you make sure all the parts are evolving simultaneously without deadlegging the big hitters?
These are questions being answered in real time, which means they're often answered a degree late, hindsight informing us that, well, maybe giving away free tickets to attract early crowds was a poor exercise in retention. Or that yoking yourself to the streaming horse so early might earn bucks but detract new audiences. And yes, officiating should have been a priority point of investment at the start. We're past that now.
How do you build a whole infrastructure and development pathway to match the investment of clubs elsewhere without rushing unready into the flames?
The WSL isn't alone in this quagmire. Officials across Europe are not full-time (Chelsea manager Sonia Bompastor has the receipts). Officials in the NWSL are still assigned from the Professional Referee Organization's second tier, which means, like the WSL, officiating is a salary supplement.
Full-time employment is no panacea, either. Officiating will never divorce human error. Sky Sports dedicates an hour every Monday morning to feasting on the bones of this guarantee, despite salaries ranging between £73,191 and £147,258. The fortress of Stockley Park is so often a source of desire for disillusioned WSL fans and managers after another mistake.
Yet VAR falls within the jurisdiction of a bunch of humans in a box who still need to be taught how to use it. Which means more training. More education. More time and money that's coming but we aren't there yet.
If women's football is grappling with any fundamental truth, it's that moving before the foundations are built compounds problems, not solves them. Women's football is a game perennially playing catch-up. Officiating is not immune. But the consensus and direction is, at least, clear: Invest and educate now, before the gap grows too great.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tottenham Hotspur FCW, Women's Soccer, Women's Super League
