Joaquín Ramos Marcos has left us at the age of 78, 30 years after his end as a referee. However, his figure was still present due to his not-so-distant task as an analyst and disseminator of the Regulation in various journalistic spaces, including two with such high following as ‘El Día Ahora’, on Canal +, and ‘El Chiringuito’, before called ‘Punto Pelota’. As a referee and as a media specialist he will have had his supporters and detractors, but at the time of goodbye I understand that it is appropriate to analyze the evolution of arbitration over time through his figure.
Ramos Marcos’s was an intuitive refereeing. Yesterday, one of the next generation, also retired, told me that his team admired him, above all, his ability to get things right from a kind of instinct and mastery of the philosophy of the game, something that led him to get plays right. difficult, sometimes viewed from a reckless distance. Because his physique, like that of most of those in his country, was not like that of the current ones, some battered guys, physically sharp.
Times without VAR, of course. I’ll come back to it later. And times when they were paid very little, a referee fee per game and diets for sleeping and eating that fell short depending on the whims they wanted to indulge in. Let’s say that what they could have left could represent at most something like a fifth of their annual income. They all had other jobs, which through tricks they had managed to make compatible with the movements and absences required by arbitration. In his case he was an insurance salesman. Many were representatives of any product and took advantage of their trips around Spain to improve their clientele.
The linemen, which is what we called them and I still find it difficult to use ‘assistants’, were not specialists, but rather lower-level referees from the same regional federation as the head of the trio, who chose the most intelligent and promising to accompany him through the fields. of First Class as a way of getting them started and introducing them to scenarios and hobbies. This is how they completed their preparation. The friction of so many trips together gave them rapport and complicity; At a time without headphones or communication between them, they exchanged gestures and glances from a distance to transmit information to each other in the way of mus couples.
In that arbitration Ramos Marcos reigned as one of the greats. Fondón, bald and with a powerful mustache, had all the air of a rural sergeant of the Civil Guard and not one bit less of authority. He had played, according to him quite well, although I don’t know if that well, for Peñaranda until a meniscus injury sidelined him and he decided to turn to refereeing to be close to his fans. He had been a cook before he was a friar, and although he was by no means a Talmudist of the Regulation, as I was able to verify in many conversations with him on the subject, he carried out his task from a strict devotion to its primordial essence, so lost today in details. He had innate authority, by presence, self-confidence and worldliness. No individual or collective protest diminished him. That was why he was so frequently given clashes between Madrid and Barcelona, only suitable for guys who were tough on the inside and calm on the outside.
I lost track of him some time ago, when he left ‘El Chiringuito’ after a stroke that did not annul him, but left him a little slower to react. He closed in on himself in his house in Quijorna, with a second family that I know gave him great joy, as I learned from a mutual friend.
Now that it’s missing, I’m curious about what impression today’s refereeing would make on you (I say arbitration, not referees), half submitted and half accommodated to the VAR, super professionalized (today a Spanish referee can do well for 300,000 euros a year), with enormous demand in terms of physical fitness (in his time it was not unusual to find a referee eating at three in the afternoon to referee at five, if one of today did something like that his hair would fall out), but with a Regulation that ha stopped being conceived as a natural law to atomize it into a scattering of casuistry that attempts to prevent the infinity of situations that football produces.
I don’t tend to be nostalgic, and even less so in football, where everything is better: the players, the fields, the balls, the broadcasts, even the behavior of the public, even if things continue to happen. But there is something in this electronic, sophisticated arbitration, drunk with removable circulars that does make me long for that old school, careless in some ways, but endearingly respectful of the essentials of the game.
