Violence against referees

A month has now passed since an 18-year-old referee in an amateur game in Hanover was beaten unconscious. Twelve players were involved in the assault. Despite some brief domestic news coverage, the incident has already been forgotten by the majority of Germany's public.

Now a report from northern German broadcaster NDR - due to be broadcast on Wednesday in Germany - is set to show that the event in Hanover at the end of last year was no exception. In fact, according to the report, some 600 games are stopped each year in German football due to attacks on refs.

In the documentary, amateur referee Thomas Kahle talks openly about an attack that he was subjected to after issuing a player a second yellow card.

"The player knocked me to the ground," Kahle told the program. "He did martial arts and he hit me deliberately on the larynx. The paramedics told me that I was about half a centimeter away from being dead."

Not a one-off

Kahle's story is not a unique one. Just about every weekend in German amateur football, a referee is brutally attacked. The German Football Association (the DFB) regularly makes announcements urging players and fans to respect the referees. Otherwise, the nation's football governing body knows that very few people would put their name forward to become referees.

The problem has also caused headlines in other parts of Europe too. In the Netherlands in December 2012 a volunteer linesman was beaten to death by youths. Some 12,000 people took part in a memorial march through the town of Almere afterwards.

Thaya Vester, a criminologist at the University of Tübingen, reports that of the 2,600 referees she surveyed in the German state of Baden Württemberg, some 40 percent of them said they had been threatened during their work.

"It's not just the classic threat, 'Ref, we know where you parked your car,' Vester told NDR. "People really do wait for the referees, in the car park, after the game."

"Around 17 percent of those we asked had also been physically attacked," Vester, herself a hobby footballer, told NDR.

"It's actually a sport, a hobby, but you still have the feeling that it is a matter of life and death."

The documentary "Tatort Kreisklasse: Wenn der Schiri zum Freiwild wird" will be aired on German national broadcaster ARD at 21:45 UTC on Wednesday, January 7.