Chile Combats Whining With Ex-Con Referees

There’s every chance this is the best story we’ve yet featured here, at least the one fraught with the most simultaneously delightful and harrowing possibilities, and there’s an equal chance there’s not a hint of hyperbole in that statement.

A Chilean prison is training ex-convicts for life on the outside with one specific trade: football referee.

I can’t believe the people who decide these things to have ever watched a football game in their lives.

A group of Chilean convicts are learning to impart justice on a scruffy prison football pitch, hoping to turn around their lives by becoming referees when they finish out their jail terms.

The 20 men and 10 women are the first to be chosen for the special referee training program, which is intended to both reward them for good behavior and prepare them for re-entry to society.

The start has been with inter-prison games and will evolve to amateur games on the outside. Games where shankings are met with a yellow card and protesting said yellow with “I’ll see you in the showers”.

So Chile instantly shoots to the top of the list for country with the least dissent and protesting.

The referee ignores the shouting and pays close attention to the game, with an instructor intently watching. Sometimes a player protests a call, and someone on the sidelines will shout not to forget who is the judge.

There’s a fair bit of genius in this plan.

But really, many in prison deserve their second chance; however, tossing that second chance into the middle of a football match, which often resemble a prison riot on a good day, leaves the mind wandering with frightful imagination…

Video here.

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Category: South America