I don’t think it’s common. At least, I haven’t noticed it much in the games that I’ve watched, with the notable exception of the Men’s World Cup five years ago. The stands were full of noisemakers called vuvuzelas, apparently some sort of traditional thing in South Africa (the host country), and they were horrendously obnoxious. FIFA banned them from the World Cup tournament in Brazil last year.
I’ve never heard of it and doubt it happens at any high level of competition. Possible, but doubtful- no cite, just my feeling. (To be fair, Italy’s top league endured a match-fixing scandal a few years ago, but I don’t think it involved referees.) The unfortunate thing is just that refereeing soccer is hard. The ref has to make an instantaneous judgment on the degree of contact, how much it interfered with the opposing player, whether it was intentional or avoidable, and often whether the player contacted the ball or the opposing player first. (Short of outright dangerous plays, if a defender makes contact with the ball first, it’s interpreted as a legitimate play, while contact with the player first is a foul.) Now, granted, that’s true of many other sports, too, but for soccer, you have to add onto these factors the (also subjective and instantaneous) advantage rule, wherein a foul can be ignored if the victimized team appears to be pressing ahead with an offensive opportunity that would be killed with a whistle, and the propensity of some players and teams to fake contact in hopes of drawing a foul (MUCH worse in the men’s game). Finally, unlike most other team field sports, there’s only that one official to blow the whistle, and the field is one of the largest of any sport- much of the time the ref is either a long way away or at a bad angle to see exactly what’s going on but still has to make those decisions anyway.
“The officiating in that match was terrible”- such has been said of probably every single soccer game since the sport was invented. I’ve said it myself many times, and in truth there seems to be a larger-than-usual number of people saying it about the U.S.-Colombia game. But, well, it’s just a really tough job.
