When two people want to understand each other but do not speak the same language, they try to do so by speaking louder, gesticulating or resorting to things they do not understand about borders. And be careful, this is assuming that in football we always want to understand the referee: it would not be the first or the last time that a player acts the Swede when faced with a warning or a substitution… if he is winning, of course.
Despite Tom Cruise’s sui generis speech at the last 2026 World Cup, in modern football we make do with English (however tacky it may be) and the rules of the IFAB, made up of the four football associations of the United Kingdom and FIFA, which allows anyone to know what it means when the referee team raises the flag or a card suddenly appears. It wasn’t always like this, so imagine the pitched battles that took place.
The problem. An Italian and a Chilean go and… no, it’s not a joke: in the early 60s there were episodes of great violence in football and one of the most sadly remembered matches was the match between Chile and Italy in the 1962 World Cup, so much so that it is known as the “Battle of Santiago”. At that time there were no mechanisms to stop this aggressiveness in the form of fights and fouls that occurred as a result of the heat on the playing field.
The World Cup that changed everything. The quarterfinal match between Argentina and England in the 1966 World Cup was a before and after. As Smitshonian reports, at one point, an Argentine player tried to communicate with the (German) referee and his vehement gestures and pleas, impossible for the referee to understand, cost him expulsion for verbal violence. The player refused to leave the field until Kenneth George Aston, a member of the FIFA Referees Committee and also responsible for the refereeing of that World Cup, intervened.
In that match the referee Rudolf Kreitlein had cautioned the Englishmen Bobby and Jack Charlton and had sent off the Argentine Antonio Rattín, but it was so unclear in the match that those interested found out better later, thanks to the press. In fact, so much so that the England coach, Alf Ramsey, went to a FIFA representative to clear up any doubts. Of course, the heat resulting from the match, the ambient noise and the language barrier between players and referee made understanding each other an impossible mission. Aston came to that conclusion, and he left there determined to change it.
The solution. So he set out to do something to make the referee’s decisions clearer for both players and spectators. And something came to mind that everyone knows: traffic lights. Aston tells how it came to him: “As I was driving down Kensington Street in London, the traffic light turned red and I thought, ‘Yellow,’ you can still get through; ‘Red,’ means stop, out of bounds.”
When he got home, he told his wife Hilda about his idea, who they say disappeared from the living room to return a few minutes later with two cardboard cards that fit perfectly in his shirt pocket, thus materializing the idea. The system officially debuted at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, 107 years after the birth of football’s first governing body, and has since been adopted by all federations.
The power of a simple cardboard. Writer Rob Walker summarizes well the effect that that simple piece of paper has: it has enormous power when a referee displays it in an almost theatrical way in the player’s face. It provokes a stadium full of whistles and exaggerated gestures from the arms of the cautioned player and his teammates. Because everyone knows what it means: the loss of possession of the ball, a free kick and even being left with one less player on the field of play.
Kenneth George Aston, who died in 2001, summed up the vision of football where that gesture that he himself invented and that is still valid in each and every match has extreme importance: a dramatic work in two acts with 22 actors and a stage director, the referee, without a script and without a known ending.
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Portada | Jason Gulledge and Tasnim News Agency
