“Two minutes!”
The call comes from a matchday assistant, letting everyone in the locker room know when they’re expected on the field. Deep inside the bowels of Lower.com field, the home of Columbus Crew, you can feel the dull thud of the public address system and hear the muffled chants and stomps from supporters above. We’re moments away from MLS Cup 2023, and the locker room denizens are pacing around, performing gameday rituals while a boombox in the corner blares. At the moment, it’s “Lose Yourself,” by Eminem.
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The captain offers final instructions to his teammates.
“If we don’t work as a team,” he belts out, “we won’t succeed. So this is it, boys, there’s no tomorrow.”
The group huddles together, arms slung over each other’s shoulders in a circle. You can almost smell the nervous energy. Or maybe it’s just the Bengay, or the Tiger Balm.
You see, this isn’t the Crew’s locker room, nor does it belong to LAFC, their opponents in this edition of MLS Cup, the final match of the league’s longest-ever season. To arrive at this place, you’ll walk much further down the hall, past the kitchen, the utility room and the small changing area for Crew Cat, Columbus’ feline mascot. Swing the door open, walk past the pile of match balls, the table full of commemorative coins, and the stack of yellow and red cards and you’ll arrive at the changing area for the game’s officials.
The league’s championship match is a pivotal moment for every person here. For some, it may be the apex of an often thankless career. The game’s players earned their spot in the championship match via their performances on the field and so has this crew, hand-selected to represent the best American officiating has to offer.
Among them is 37-year-old Armando Villarreal, a first-generation Mexican-American who started refereeing four- and five-year-old kids in his father’s rec league in Brownsville, Texas, in the early 2000s. Two decades years later, Villarreal is among the American game’s most distinguished officials, one of the few to earn the right to call FIFA international matches and one of the tiny group to have officiated at a men’s World Cup. Villarreal refereed the very first game of the 2023 MLS season on Feb. 25. Now, nine months and 521 matches later, he will be the center referee for its last.
“Today,” Villarreal says to his crew just before they take the field, “we will have the best game of our lives.”
About 24 hours before the opening kickoff, Alan Kelly walks the pitch at Lower.com Field in a peacoat and slacks. A three-time MLS referee of the year, Kelly has taken part in multiple MLS Cups and a laundry list of other important matches. In other years, he would probably be out here in athletic gear, but he retired two years ago.
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It’s not the easiest exercise for him. Kelly is a third-generation referee and he confesses that he’ll still call the occasional college match just to get his fix. The Irish-born 48-year-old now serves as the director of senior referees for the Professional Referee Organization (PRO) and he was largely responsible for selecting the crew who will call tomorrow’s title match.
“Every single referee starts the season looking to get that phone call,” says Kelly. “The call where someone tells them they’ve been assigned to MLS Cup.”
This will be Villarreal’s second MLS Cup. He will be joined by a distinguished crew: assistant referees Cameron Blanchard and Ian McKay, fourth official Jon Freemon, video assistant referee (VAR) Kevin Stott and assistant VAR TJ Zablocki. Kelly and others at PRO used a fairly straightforward set of principles to select the crew, with a special focus on playoff form.
“If you don’t have a good game in the playoffs, you will not advance to the next round,” Villarreal says. “A player misses a penalty, now they’re out. Same for referees. We have to make good decisions to keep on going, and I think I’ve gotten the big decisions right.”
This year’s edition of the MLS postseason has not been without its share of referee-related controversy. There have been on-field incidents — razor-thin offside calls, debatable yellow and red cards and a missed handball that may have fundamentally changed the outcome of a conference semifinal — but also plenty of chatter about what’s transpired off the pitch.
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In the playoffs’ opening round, Vancouver Whitecaps head coach Vanni Sartini was ejected in the dying moments of his team’s matchup against LAFC for arguing with center referee Tim Ford. In his postgame remarks, Sartini said jokingly that if Ford were to be found dead in a local creek, Sartini would be the prime suspect. The coach later apologized and was eventually issued a five-match ban.
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Perhaps the most impactful playoff officiating moment concerned FC Cincinnati defender Matt Miazga, who entered the referee’s locker room after his side’s opening-round match against the New York Red Bulls. Accounts vary of what transpired after Miazga entered the changing area, with the Professional Soccer Referees Association suggesting that the player was “forcibly removed” and others suggesting that Miazga’s behavior was more tempered. All sides, though, seem to agree that he had no real business being there, and Miazga was issued a three-match suspension.
Earlier on MLS Cup day, MLS commissioner Don Garber offered his thoughts at his annual state of the league address, suggesting referee safety was a “massive priority” for the league. Kelly, for his part, seems exhausted by the still-ongoing discourse surrounding Miazga’s behavior.
“In-stadium security is something that we shouldn’t be overly concerned about,” Kelly says. “But we are.”
There are other concerns, as well. Like MLS players, PRO referees operate under a collective bargaining agreement. The current version of that agreement is set to expire this coming January and negotiations for a new one are ongoing. The terms of the current edition, a copy of which was obtained by The Athletic, lay bare some of the challenges faced by professional referees in addition to abuse from fans, players and coaches.
Center referees in MLS make a base pay of anywhere from about $50,000 to a little over $100,000, depending on the number of matches they’ve called. Assistants and VARs have their own pay scale. This is supplemented by pay for individual matches, which varies. A fourth official can make as little as $600 for a regular-season match, whereas the center ref can make $1350. That pay scale slides upwards as the postseason progresses. The crew at MLS Cup, for example, will make nearly five times that amount.
Higher-end officials in PROs pool of about 120 referees make a comfortable enough living, but things are particularly meager for referees during their “probationary” period, in their first two-years of full-time service. They can face many of the same challenges senior referees do — the constant travel and criticism — for comparative peanuts. The advent of video review, where plays are picked apart in granular detail, has only added to the pressure.
You truly have to wonder — what sort of person even wants to start doing this job?
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Villarreal says that after he started calling youth matches, his sporting heroes changed from superstar players to the region’s more notable referees: Baldomero Toledo, Ricardo Salazar and Jair Marrufo among them. Meeting Toledo, Villarreal says, “was like meeting a rockstar, for me.”
“Growing up, everyone wants to play,” Villarreal continues. “Everyone wants to be a professional player. But as soon as you start refereeing, you get into this passion. It is a challenge at every level, from little kids all the way up to the professionals. But I do think we are programmed differently. As referees we need a strong personality, sometimes we have to change our personality. Sometimes we have to be the good cop, other times we have to be the bad cop. We do have to have very thick skin, especially at the professional level. Because the hatred is out there.”
It’s Saturday, about two hours before the opening kick of MLS Cup, Villarreal and the rest of his crew load onto a bus headed for the stadium.
Stott, tonight’s VAR, sits at the back. He’s spent the morning mentally preparing by going on a long run with his two young sons. At 56, Stott is the eldest of the group by far, and his teammates hold him in a sort of reverence. A California native, this trip out to Columbus has given Stott a bit of a break from his day job as a middle-school math teacher, something he’s done for nearly three decades. He’s also easily the longest-tenured continuously-serving pro referee in U.S. Soccer history.
Stott retired from center refereeing duties last year after calling 382 MLS matches during his career. That number grows to nearly 600 games when you add in his assignments as a fourth official, VAR and AVAR, and his statistics become even more impressive when you factor in the fact that he spent much of his career calling matches during a time when assignment opportunities were limited by the tiny number of teams in MLS, sometimes as few as 10.
His presence here keeps another streak alive: Stott has taken part in a playoff match in every year of the league’s existence. This is his seventh MLS Cup.
“I still have the same excitement as back in my first one,” Stott says. “The excitement is still there, the nerves in the stomach are still there. I’m just looking forward to the experience. The feelings haven’t changed much over the 28 years.”
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Earlier in the day, Stott and others convened in a small meeting room at their hotel and received their match shirts and shorts, all emblazoned with commemorative lettering celebrating the occasion.
Quickly, that get-together turned into a roast of Villarreal, the shortest member of the crew. “We got you some youth shorts,” said Kelly, “and your shirts are tailored just the way you like them.” Just like players, many referees have special requests when it comes to equipment. Villarreal likes his sleeves a little tighter than most, in case you’re wondering, and he seems to take special interest in his on-field appearance: hair perfectly coiffed, uniform neatly-pressed.
Their bus to the match hurtles through downtown Columbus accompanied by a police escort. The sidewalks are lined with Crew fans, all decked out in the team’s iconic black-and-gold colors, and a few of them seem to have spotted the placard on the windshield of the vehicle that reads “MLS OFFICIALS.” Those fans raise their voices, and their middle fingers as well. There’s very little conversation on the ride over, and for the first time all weekend, you feel the big-game nerves creeping in.
“I’m still going to approach this game like any other game,” says Villarreal. “It’s 90 minutes, overtime if needed. But you can’t deny that it’s the championship. The focus, the concentration is maybe even a little bit higher than normal because one decision can determine the champion of the entire league.
“I know all of these players. I’ve already reffed them throughout the season, and last year and the year before, you name it. We have a reputation with them. The most important thing, for me, is that I want to let them know what they are going to get today. When they see me warming up, I want them to say ‘ok, it’s Armando, I know he’s going to call the game this particular way’ or ‘we cannot speak to him in a certain way.’ I have to set the tone.”
It’s clear that the officials have done their research on both teams. Villarreal knows that Columbus midfielder Darlington Nagbe, for example, was fouled a game-high seven times during the Crew’s conference final against Cincinnati. He isn’t seeking to protect that player in particular, but knows to look for persistent infringement and to keep the game moving.
“Be ready for the fans, be ready for everything,” Villarreal says to his crew as the match approaches. “If we don’t talk to each other (over our earpieces) for 10 minutes, and nothing is happening? No worries. That’s fine. But if something happens, then we communicate. We have to communicate.”
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Villarreal turns to Freemon, his fourth official.
“Your number one priority is not the benches. It’s the field. Always have your eyes on the field, as much as you f—ing can. It could be you making that big decision tonight. One team gets a quick counterattack? Then boom, I’m out. Maybe I won’t have the best angle. So be ready. You’ll talk to the benches but the priority tonight is on the field.”
The crew walks down the hall and joins the players for the pregame walkout. Nagbe is at the head of Columbus’ line and he greets Villarreal warmly. LAFC captain Carlos Vela offers his own embrace. The group walks through the stadium’s field-level fan lounge, through the tunnel and out onto the field. After pre-match fireworks and a screeching flyover by a pair of fighter jets, Villarreal raises his whistle to his lips and gets things underway.
The opening moments of the match feel like they almost always do when a championship is on the line: nervy and a little disjointed.
Villarreal involves himself almost immediately in the fourth minute when LAFC defender Diego Palacios commits a tactical foul against Columbus attacker Diego Rossi near the center stripe. It’s a possible yellow card, but Palacios escapes with a stern warning. The home crowd explodes six minutes later, when Crew midfielder Aiden Morris goes down at the edge of the penalty area, his teammates raising their arms and pleading for a penalty. Without hesitation, Villarreal tells Morris to get off the ground and continue playing. No call.
As he said he’d do a day earlier, Villarreal is setting the tone early on and things are moving smoothly. Half an hour into the match, though, he faces his first massive decision of the evening.
Columbus winger Yaw Yeboah swings a dangerous cross into the area, which Rossi gets his boot on. The ball deflects up and towards Palacios and seemingly hits his chest, and then his arm. Villarreal, who has himself positioned about 10 yards away, has a perfect angle on the play and immediately calls for a penalty. Several LAFC players attempt to dissuade him but Villarreal holds firm, motioning to his arm and going to his earpiece to communicate with Stott and others in the VAR booth.
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Villarreal’s attention to detail in terms of his appearance comes to the forefront here. Much of his job is about projecting an image of confidence and authority and his body language and demeanor goes a long way towards doing that here. In the end, replays show that he undoubtedly made the right call, as Palacios’ arm was extended far from his body and changed the trajectory of a dangerous ball. LAFC’s protests don’t last long.
Columbus nets that PK and adds another goal by the halftime whistle. As they re-enter the locker room for halftime, Villarreal and his crew debrief and prepare for the second half.
“Great work, boys,” says Villarreal, seated at his locker in the corner. “Things have been fast paced, let’s keep it up. I think the first couple of fouls were key, we set the tone.” Nagbe does not seem to be a target, Villarreal says, as he’s only been fouled twice in the opening 45.
Quickly, the conversation turns to the pivotal moment of the half: the penalty call.
“His arm was clearly extended,” Villarreal says. “It was in an unnatural position. Had I been positioned a little more to the right, it would’ve been a tougher call but I had a great view. There was just no doubt about it, it was clear.”
In most ways, the first half could not have gone better for this crew. They’re potentially 45 minutes away from success, but Villarreal knows that every second of the match that presents itself is another chance for error, another chance to be written into the history books for the wrong reasons.
“Whatever happened in the first half is in the past,” he says to his crew as they re-enter the tunnel and walk towards the field. “The second half is an entirely different game.”
It does not take long for LAFC to present Villarreal with another key decision. Crew attacker Cucho Hernandez receives a pass on the far sideline and starts a counterattack. As he crosses midfield, LAFC forward Carlos Vela — likely playing in his final match ever for the club — lunges out at him desperately, his studs up on one foot. There’s contact, and Hernandez goes to ground, rolling around in an attempt to sell a red card.
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On the surface, it does seem like a clear red. But Villarreal, again, is well-positioned. McKay is on the same side as the action and has his own angle as he runs upfield with Columbus’ backline. Villarreal goes to his earpiece to see if the play will be recommended for review, but it isn’t.
“We did talk about it,” Villarreal will say later about the challenge. “But it was a fairly clear yellow card.”
On replay, it becomes apparent why: Vela did not make contact with his studs, instead fouling Hernandez with the laces of his other boot, which trailed behind. Villarreal’s call feels correct, if only by inches, and the match proceeds.
LAFC pulls within one about 10 minutes from the final whistle and the flow of the match changes entirely. Things get frantic as full-time approaches and Villarreal is again called into action when Italian legend Giorgio Chiellini, playing in the final game of his career, clatters awkwardly into Crew goalkeeper Patrick Schulte. There’s not much in the challenge at all, and Schulte makes a meal of it.
Chiellini, who is no stranger to simulation, taunts his opponent and motions for him to get up and get things moving again. Villarreal, a full five years younger than Chiellini and about six inches shorter, positions himself between the two players and sternly tells the Italian to walk away, pointing upfield.
“When I have players like that and situations like that, I have to be smart, because of my height” Villarreal later says, laughing. “If I have two big players, and I put myself between them, I might be on the floor a few seconds later. If it’s one, two, three players, I try to manage. If it’s four, five, six seven players, I’m out of there.”
Villarreal blows the final whistle and his crew assembles near midfield, forming a bit of a welcoming line. It feels obvious enough that they’ve called a fair match, one without incident, as only a smattering of LAFC players show up to complain, and they do so half-heartedly. LA manager Steve Cherundolo asks about an offside call but mostly shows up as a display of sportsmanship, greeting each official. Italian legend Chiellini, just moments after drawing Villarreal’s ire, finds him and offers him a warm embrace and a few kind words.
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In the days leading up to the match, every member of the staff has been open and welcoming but also maybe a bit reserved. Now, their guard falls a bit. McKay, the AR who was participating in his first MLS Cup, grows emotional.
“This is not one game of release, now that it’s over,” he says. “For me this is 21 years of release. This is a whole career of release. All I can do is think of the 21 years of grinding that led up to this.”
McKay is holding his tears back, but as the rest of the crew stand in line to receive their post-match medals, Villarreal breaks down entirely. Tears roll down his face as he’s comforted by his teammates and by ex-referee Mark Geiger, PRO’s general manager.
“I’m thinking about my family,” says Villarreal. “About everything we went through. All the ups and downs, you know? Especially my wife, you know? She has been there since day one. We had a lot of downs.”
Villarreal cuts himself off, unable to complete his thought. He winds his way back through the tunnels under the stadium and arrives back at the locker room with the rest of his staff. He finds Stott, and wraps his arms around him. “You are the GOAT,” Villarreal says. Stott, who seems like a generally reserved guy, tries his hand at comforting Villarreal, who is still overcome by the gravity of the moment.
The crew gets changed and unpacks the game, from the handball to Vela’s yellow. You get the feeling that the tone would’ve been very different had there been more controversy. Tonight, there is a sense of satisfaction, of a job well done.
Things are a little wilder in Columbus’ locker room, where the champagne has already been uncorked and the music is blasting. In their own way, though, the officials down the hall have also contributed to the grand nature of this match, mostly by staying out of the way.
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And you can very much feel that in this moment. Even at the apex of their careers, the most a referee can really hope for is to not be perceived as part of a match. When they do their job correctly, they are largely invisible. By definition, it is very much a thankless job.
It does not seem to matter to Villarreal. The tears are gone now. He laughs when he thinks back to his humble origins. When he first started, he recalls, they made him wear a massive, neon-green shirt. On the back, it read “REFEREE IN TRAINING,” a student driver bumper sticker come to life. Things are a little different now.
“I have a wife and two kids, a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old boy,” says Villarreal. “We miss birthdays, anniversaries, you name it. But this job comes with perks as well, I have gotten to see all kinds of places. From where I was born at, in Brownsville? I never thought I was going to leave Brownsville. And now I’m here, and working all over the world. It’s amazing.”
(Top photo: Pablo Maurer)