The NFL can and does penalize teams for unacceptable crowd behavior. Do soccer leagues do the same? If a supporter of FC Higgontonbottomshire ran onto the pitch and kicked the Chudleytown SC goalkeeper in the nuts, does he earn his team a red card?
A red card would need to go to a specific player, so I doubt they could give one at random for fan misbehavior. Games have been shut down for bad behavior by fans though, and the home team takes the loss.
That would obviously depend on the rules of the country’s football association.
For example in Germany (Deutscher Fussball-Bund) a game that has to be aborted due to a club’s fault (including the club’s fans) is counted as lost 0:2 by the club at fault. There is also schedule of fines to a club, graduated by league and offence, for example in the Bundesliga: “banner with unsporting message, up to 3 m²: 2,000 € per banner - 3 m² and above: 8,000 €; use of a laser pointer: 4,000 € per count; intrusion on playing field: 3,000 € per person.”
Referees cannot show red cards to non-participants, but teams can certainly be punished for fan misbehavior by leagues. It happens more often than you’d think.
How do you establish which side is responsible for the fan in question? I’d think false-flag operations would be common.
In many European stadia, there are cameras on the crowds such that they can catch miscreants to a pretty remarkable degree, so anybody launching missiles (coins, rocks, bananas, flares) can frequently be identified positively. Also, most home and away sections are pretty carefully separated, particularly in derby matches where passions are likely to run highest, so ‘false flag’ ops would be harder to carry out. Every now and then, individual fans are banned (sometimes for life) from their home team’s grounds. Other kinds of abuse that can be punished are not down to one person or even a few, but many, as in offensive chants and taunts, in which case the team can be fined, subjected to points deductions, or even harsher penalties.
No there are lots of ways teams can be punished for bad fan behavior but a red card is not one of them
The referee can abandon the match (the match can be forfeited and assigned as a win to the other team), the offending team can be thrown out of the tournament for one or more seasons, or forced to play matches behind closed doors. For serious offences all the teams from that country can be thrown out of the competition (this happened to English club teams in European competitions in the 1980s after some terrible incidents that lead to dozens of deaths)
If it was individuals they would just be removed, punishments happen when a significant amount of the crowd is being difficult.
At the amateur level in the United States, US Soccer’s guidance to referees places the onus on the coaches to control their team’s fans. I have heard of referees showing red cards to spectators, but that’s not how the cow is supposed to eat the cabbage. Recreational referees are instructed to briefly stop a match when spectator behavior becomes a problem, approach the coaches of both teams, and advise them to control their respective fans or else they (the coaches) will be held accountable. In my refereeing career, I have done this in three stages. First, a quiet word to the coaches and only the coaches, in a small, 3-5 person huddle along the touchline at midfield. The quiet word would remind them they were responsible for their fans, and include that if I had to send off all a team’s credentialed coaches, the game would have to be abandoned. If that doesn’t work, I would have much the same huddle with the coaches but only approach to about five yards from the touchline, so the ‘quiet word’ would not be so quiet. If that didn’t work and the spectator misbehavior continued, I would send off a coach. I’ve only had to send off one coach in nearly 10 years of carrying the whistle.
Coaches or players would never get sent off for crowd trouble (unless perhaps the referee thought the player/coach was somehow involved or encouraging the crowd). The referee would obviously attempt to find a way to continue the match if possible to do so safely, and their job would include talking to local officials to try to resolve the problems. A core part of their role is to ensure the safety of the participants and spectators, so that always comes first.
The referee’s report would then become part of the evidence the governing body would use to later decide what punishments, if any, should be given to the club responsible. It could include a fine, a points deduction, a directive to shut parts of the ground in future games, and even disqualification.
Yeah I was going add there have been plenty of cases of players and coaches getting in physical altercations with pitch invaders, and also rare cases of players getting red cards for attacking fans. So in theory the referee could choose to send a player or coach off for accosting a pitch invader but AFAIK it’s never happened.
Here’s an example:
Makes me wonder what would happen if a few rival fans decided to false-flag a team by dressing up in their attire and engage in banned behavior. Is there an appeals process?
Such as, for instance, if some Arsenal fans dressed up as Tottenham so they can get sanctions and penalties levied against Tottenham.
Especially at an Arsenal-Tottnumb derby, those fans would be kept far, far apart. You don’t casually walk up to a ticket window on match day to buy one of those tickets, they’re sold out well in advance, and usually to people known to their respective clubs. There are no neutrals at derby matches, so your theoretical Arsenal fans would probably have to sign up online for the Tiny Totts’ ticketing scheme to get their hands on tickets, in addition to buying their kit. And they would have to do it in such numbers that it’d be nearly impossible to pick out the miscreants from the larger crowd. Possible? Sure. Likely? No.
That’s some bullshit. How was the player to know that the guy wasn’t armed and trying to attack him? Did we learn nothing from the Monica Seles stabbing? Unauthorized people running onto the field should be fair game for whoever can put them down.