Follow live coverage of England vs Netherlands in the Euro 2024 semi-final today
The breakthrough star of this summer’s European Championship only played her first match on Monday.
ITV’s referee analyst Christina Unkel speaks The Athletics before leaving for the media match against the BBC in Berlin. First she meets Jill Scott for a coffee – one of the players she booked in her previous life as an elite referee is now a colleague – and on Wednesday she will be there for coverage of England’s semi-final against the Netherlands. She worked on all of ITV’s matches during the tournament, plus their highlight shows.
It’s a miracle she finds the time. Unkel is also the president of the Tampa Bay Sun, a new team that will play in its inaugural USL Super League season in August, a fitness app founder and a litigator. She is well known to American viewers, having appeared on Fox, CBS and Paramount Plus football coverage, but Euro 2024 marked her breakthrough in Britain and she won plaudits for her calm authority.
The 37-year-old is whip-smart and her contributions have often provided some of the most compelling parts of ITV’s half-time and post-match coverage. Unkel is often challenged by pundits Gary Neville, Ian Wright, Roy Keane and Ange Postecoglou, who, while aware of the changing laws of football, still don’t like them all.
“That’s the whole point of why I did this in the first place,” she says. “I encourage them. Everyone says, ‘I feel like they’re beating you up.’ Not at all! Ask me questions! If they as professional football players struggle with these questions, the general population also struggles.
“If I just wanted to cash a paycheck and walk out, I’d probably cringe. But those are the opportunities I long for. Those are the conversations that IFAB (the governing body of the International Football Association, the game’s legislators) may need from the football community.
“They have such a high level of football knowledge and sometimes – quite rightly – they don’t even know some of the nuances. You can look at the laws of the game, but the nuances or the application – what I call the case application – are not there.”
Unkel started her own refereeing career at the age of 10. She had been the kind of player who took unfair offense to the referees, to the extent that her coach told her to keep quiet or take a course and actually learn the rules. The referees’ treatment was friendlier when she came forward – if it hadn’t been that way, she says, she’s not sure she would have stayed in the game – and if she faced any sexist abuse about returning to the kitchen, she would shake it off with the wish that her opponents would come up with something more original.
Primarily, she was focused on becoming the kind of official she longed to encounter as a player.
“As a female footballer, people would be assigned to our matches and either not take it seriously or think they’re not really a problem,” she says. ‘The fact that someone didn’t care about our game because it was a girls’ game drove me crazy. We still deserved fair treatment, quality, care and concern. There are times when you simply remember a referee for how well he did his job. That’s why I always wanted to be remembered.”
Unkel graduated and discovered that there was little infrastructure for women’s professional soccer in the United States. Playing abroad was not an option when wages were so bad. Refereeing was the best way to stay involved – even though the pay in the early days of her refereeing career was so meager that she would actually lose money if she gave up her day job.
Her goal was to reach the point where she could referee for sides like the U.S. women’s national team. Those were the most exciting matches of her career “because of the environment they created. I am a referee and of course no one comes to see me except my parents, but you were part of that tapestry somehow.”
Christina Unkel, pictured in 2014, during her on-pitch refereeing career (Stanley Chou – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
She played her first television role before the 2019 Women’s World Cup, making 53 appearances for Fox Sports. She joined a day before Fox announced their lineup. It meant giving up her role on the FIFA panel, and after making that sacrifice, she was keen for her involvement to involve more than just criticizing her former colleagues. That, she says, is why “this role is very taboo,” although the stigma is shifting.
“Not many people had fulfilled this role in the way I envisioned it, which was educating the masses,” she says. “If the referee has made a correct decision, break it down: here is the game, here is the law, here is what the answer should have been. It is very rare for public officials to get wrong just because it is a pure misapplication of the law. That’s easy to explain without destroying an official. It’s not my job to judge the referee; My job is to explain the laws.
“When I stepped into that role, some people were left out. Some friends of mine disagreed.” They stopped by when she was picked up by CBS for their 2020 Champions League coverage and they were able to see what she was trying to do. This tournament has underlined that it is worth the work.
“It was a bit enlightening for me to see so many people tearing down English referees, but they were actually some of the best performing officials in this tournament,” Unkel explained. “It’s really the goal to just inform people so they can make more informed opinions or decisions.”
At ITV she has the benefit of a full-time video operator to help her select clips for analysis; for domestic competitions she brings forward the best angle herself. The pair treat her remote studio cabin “as if I were entering a VAR room” and it helps that Unkel was part of the first batch of referees to be trained in VAR in 2017, with Howard Webb as her instructor.
That boot camp involved her sitting in video control booths with timers in the corner of the images she was watching. “After 10 or 15 seconds it goes from green to yellow, and then to red at about 30 seconds. So it feels like you’re in a spy movie that’s about to explode.” It was good preparation for the three to five seconds she has in the game to explain decisions. “Sometimes I have to break down something I’ve learned over the past twenty years. What are the one or two really important things that you want people to walk away with so they can connect it really quickly without having gone through all the refereeing courses that I’ve taken?
“You know what kind of checks are being assessed. “This is what I need to look at, and this is what I need to tear down.” And once I get that answer, I always think, “Let me in!” Let me in!’ If they bring me in before I have the answer, I comment while I’m looking for it: ‘The VAR is looking this specific angle being displayed this.‘ I basically walk the audience through the exact same mental protocol that happens in live time.
One of the most divisive features of the tournament has been the semi-automated offside situations, facilitated by additional cameras and limb tracking technology, which have denied Belgian Romelu Lukaku three goals in his first two games.
“As a striker I will never be able to accept this kind of offside,” Wright said in the aftermath of Belgium’s 2-0 win over Romania in the group stage. Unkel further outlined how certain players would have to adjust their running style to stay within the law. Spurs manager Postecoglou has also been critical of laws that now punish what would previously have been ignored. “I don’t think that’s why we introduced technology,” he has said.
“We’re just in the Goldilocks period of figuring out how we want to use our technology to improve the game,” Unkel says now. “Everyone hates toenail offside. Players hate it. Refs hate it. Fans hate it. Coaches hate it.
“We see these offside situations because of the law and the technology that is available: the semi-automatic offside situations and the lines that fall. In Major League Soccer, even to this day, they cannot afford the lines that disappear. We haven’t had any issues in Major League Soccer with toenail offside, because when you do VAR in Major League Soccer, if it’s really close and you really don’t know, you leave it like that. The goal stands. It stays that way and it doesn’t bother anyone. They were off by maybe an inch.
‘While we are here know they are off by an inch. And that’s what really frustrates people. I’ll laugh a little and make the case: competitors and leagues can save millions of dollars if they just get rid of the offside lines. The technology is very expensive. It is important that (in science) you now get someone to the point where he can say with the naked eye: does that make any sense? Would that be taken back or not? How close is that?”
The reporting has exposed a gap between expectations of the technology and how it has worked in practice. Unkel likes to point out that any change in the law is deliberate and meticulous; debates at major European tournaments can accelerate changes in legislation, but generally it takes a few years for changes to be implemented. They pass through technical and practical advisory boards, IFAB directors, FIFA representatives, players, coaches and confederations.
“When people say, ‘I didn’t expect this,’ you or someone on your coaching staff should focus on that because it will impact how you prepare for games or how you understand the implications,” Unkel says. “You can give your opinion prior to the application so that we can get a better understanding of how it will play in the game, and we do not do that afterwards.”
With Unkel on their case that could happen.
(Top photo: ITV)