Match Payments

leaguerefaus


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What a jaundiced view?

The players pay to play and have fun.
I don't pay but still have fun and get reimbursed for my petrol, a couple of beers, some food and some good banter.

I am not being taken for granted, I am helping the players and the sport.

Not you in particular, but from what I've read, many referees end up out of pocket. Not exactly the ideal way to entice new referees into the ranks.
 

SimonSmith


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What a jaundiced view?

The players pay to play and have fun.
I don't pay but still have fun and get reimbursed for my petrol, a couple of beers, some food and some good banter.

I am not being taken for granted, I am helping the players and the sport.

Out of all that, I get petrol money.

The smarter coaches and teams appreciate us. The rest...well, they take us for granted. Around here, refereeing or umpiring something like High School basketball can net someone $200+ quite easily. And they would have to travel not very far at all. My shortest trip is 105 miles round trip. Usually 220. 500 on a bad day. Yeah, the match fees will help when they get here so I can buy the FPO something nice for Christmas in appreciation of the fact that she loses me until a stupid time most every Saturday.
 

Ciaran Trainor


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On the subject of enticing refs what happens around the world for new ref courses? Here, and I stand to be corrected I think it costs the individual who wants to become a ref £40 for the ENtry level course. Often clubs reimburse this but not always. Hardly good pr for giving up 2 Sundays. Personally I think they should be free
 

leaguerefaus


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In Queensland for league, I think it's $75 for a new ref to do the course, which also includes insurance. However, there's a lot of coupons flying around which take the $75 down to $25, with the extra $50 being paid for by the Queensland Rugby League. The QRL also sets minimum match fees - $20 for u6-12s, and increasing thereafter.
 

Womble

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Being self employed, refereeing costs me money! yes we get a fee on the panel but the time that is asked of us ( when we are in our prime) the money goes no where near covering it. on average the cost in lost earnings is approx £4k-£6k per annum and I have been doing it a long time! would I change it ? No No and a big fat NO because I have had a great time doing it and enjoyed every second of my refereeing career..............:hap:
 

leaguerefaus


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Do you guys pay tax on these fees?

In Aus, refereeing is usually considered a hobby and thus exempt from tax. Obviously NRL, S15 referees etc. cannot get away with claiming this!
 

Dixie


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In Aus, refereeing is usually considered a hobby and thus exempt from tax. Obviously NRL, S15 referees etc. cannot get away with claiming this!
In UK, payments in excess of genuine out-of-pocket expenses are income. HM Revenue & Customs has had a lot of fun finding and prosecuting unemployed community soccer refs who both take their match payments and continue to claim their social security benefits.
 

leaguerefaus


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In UK, payments in excess of genuine out-of-pocket expenses are income. HM Revenue & Customs has had a lot of fun finding and prosecuting unemployed community soccer refs who both take their match payments and continue to claim their social security benefits.

Whilst not taxable here, social security has a very loose definition of 'income' and match payments do count for this purpose.
 

Browner

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HM Revenue & Customs has had a lot of fun finding and prosecuting unemployed community soccer refs who both take their match payments and continue to claim their social security benefits.

Wonder if it'll ever happen in rugby?!
 

Browner

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I don't pay but still have fun and get reimbursed for my petrol, a couple of beers, some food and some good banter.

I am not being taken for granted, I am helping the players and the sport.

Just because you don't feel "taken for granted" doesn't mean you aren't being ..... I think a lot of players/clubs/players/school do take the referee for granted. Evidenced by less than great Hospitality. At Grass roots I'd favour £30 match fee + £0.50p per mile travel expences [& a scaled rising as referees time investment is advanced ] £1 on a match fee - is a mere pittance....easily afforded c.30% the cost of a pint ! or 130% of a bag of crisps ! ....

This subject is the 'Emperors latest designer Clothes & Iphone5' ! !
 

colesy


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Wonder if it'll ever happen in rugby?!

In the UK, as long as you're not getting more than 45p per mile and doing no more than 10,000 miles per annum on expenses, HMRC deems that there is no profit element involved and therefore nothing to declare as taxable income (according to my accountant and he's paid to keep me honest).
 

OB..


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If you are going to pay referees, what about assessors and coaches? I get travel expenses plus a free all-weather coat. I'm happy.
 

TigerCraig


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If you are going to pay referees, what about assessors and coaches? I get travel expenses plus a free all-weather coat. I'm happy.

As I put above, we get $25 for coaching/assessment reports. To count you have to have been appointed and the report has to be entered into the database.
 

menace


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What a jaundiced view?

The players pay to play and have fun.
I don't pay but still have fun and get reimbursed for my petrol, a couple of beers, some food and some good banter.

I am not being taken for granted, I am helping the players and the sport.

It does seem that way Phil, but unfortunately over here, as I mentioned earlier, from my experience;
We don't get reimbursed for petrol under 150km
We don't get a couple of beers
We don't get some food
And
We don't get some good banter (unless you call abuse and dissent as banter).
It's a different culture here, so yeah, we feel we're taken for granted a lot of the time.
 

TigerCraig


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It does seem that way Phil, but unfortunately over here, as I mentioned earlier, from my experience;
We don't get reimbursed for petrol under 150km
We don't get a couple of beers
We don't get some food
And
We don't get some good banter (unless you call abuse and dissent as banter).
It's a different culture here, so yeah, we feel we're taken for granted a lot of the time.

Depends on the club. Problem is, especially at seniors, that the clubs that give you the most free beers and the best food generally have the worst supporters :shrug:
 

PaulDG


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As I put above, we get $25 for coaching/assessment reports. To count you have to have been appointed and the report has to be entered into the database.

FWIW, We've now moved away from writing reports all the time.

Yes, we do formal reports when it's appropriate for the grading committee, but we're also doing a lot of coaching/advising now to give support, suggest a few things that could have been done differently, etc. with nothing written down.

The idea is to get away from the "Oh God, I've got an assessor this Saturday" towards "Oh good, Terry/Mike/John/Paul's going to come along on Saturday, maybe he'll have some ideas about why I'm missing so much at the breakdown..."
 

TigerCraig


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We find that the juniors in particular like the written reports (we type them into a database which auto emails them to the referee and to the head of coaching) as straight after a game they don't take anything in.

This is especially the case the way our days are scheduled as unless they are doing the last game of the day they only have a 2 or 3 minute gap to get out for the next game - either as centre again or as AR, or in the case of junior refs to get ready to play their own game (which you, their referee coach, may well be refereeing which is a fun challenge - especially when they give you a quizzical "but didn't you just tell me" look).

I should note that they aren't "reports" as such - there are no grades on them. They are coaching summaries - what the ref said they wanted to work on and how that went, what else they did well, areas for improvement. Asessments are a different matter.
 

menace


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Yes...same here. Due the shortage of referee coaches and the effort to do full reports, we now have the referee coaches submitting short 'thumbnail' reports, something like:

'Johnnycake B'Good - U13 div 3. A game controlled by a much bigger and skilled White team (2 very agile bulldozers did the damage) to run out easy winners. Blue's smaller team did their best to compete and their structure at the TRM served them well to test White at times. Johnny did well to manage the offside at TRM - and appropriately sanctioned the lazy defending pillars and spoke to both captains and players about their serial offenders, which did well to prevent the need to escalate the sanction.
Johnny:
- needs to set the LO wider and watch/manage the early lifting.
- Set scrum at 5m for knock on at LO.
- Did well to 'reset' incorrectly taken quick tap.
- Had 2 instances where he missed players offside in front of kicker having a material affect.
- Spotted and dealt appropriately with high tackles.

This level is about right to allow him to work on these issues."

These are soon going into a database so that they can be shared and viewed within the group and provided to the kid too. This sytems has been working well for us for about 2 years.
 
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