Critical former referees add to culture of fear, says retiring Taylor

Just five weeks ago, Anthony Taylor was centre stage at the World Cup - refereeing the last-16 match between Spain and Portugal in Dallas. But now, for the first time in 20 years, he is not involved as an English football season gets under way. From the outside, the turnaround from officiating at the highest level to retirement seems sudden.

Here, for the first time, the 47-year-old explains his decision in detail - opening up on the impact of the often toxic debate surrounding officiating, and the intense scrutiny faced by referees. Taylor also says he thinks his fellow officials should think twice before criticising their former colleagues in the media and talks of his hopes of helping Turkish football emerge from a sprawling referee betting scandal. And he reveals what he really thinks of the video assistant referee (VAR) system.

Football Daily - Taylor on retirement, career and scrutiny on referees Taylor retired last month, announcing in a short statement the end of a career during which he officiated 668 matches in the English professional game, every major domestic cup final, and 163 international fixtures. He wrote it had been "an immense privilege, but the pressure is intense and the scrutiny is constant". "It was part of it," Taylor says when we meet at his lawyer's offices in Leeds.

"Any referee will be lying to you if they said that pressure or that scrutiny did not bother them, because that's a natural human reaction. "One of the challenges that referees face at every level is actually understanding the challenges that we face. "Fear of making mistakes, external opinion, spectators, managers, parents, media, colleagues.

All these things feed into creating self-doubt, lacking confidence, and then things can spiral out of control and you lose the ability to actually have any confidence in what you're doing on the field." For years, Taylor said he had developed "resilience" to handle the pressures he faced, but can that only last so long? "Everybody will experience times where dealing with that environment for a long period of time, your energy levels would dip," he says. "That then starts to impact on motivation and your actual confidence.

It goes back to the confidence again of, 'I've got to go again, make sure I don't make a mistake, still want to get to this tournament or have this match'. It's a very real feeling that everybody would go through. "I was very confident in my own coping mechanisms on how I dealt with that.