Fifteen teams are currently grinding their way through pre-season training before the new Super League season. No, the Rugby Football League has not suddenly decided to promote London to the big time. The people who will make the decisions on the pitch without touching the ball are also preparing for the season by hitting the treadmills, pushing weights and running laps at their base in the Etihad Campus in Manchester.

You can get a good idea what that looks like in a new documentary called Beyond the Whistle, which follows the highest-profile British referees through the 2024 season. The 40-minute film focuses on the battle between Liam Moore and Chris Kendall to be the league’s top referee, how the group copes when new rules are foisted upon them, and the work done by head of match officials, Phil Bentham.

“It’s like going back to school after the summer holidays,” Liam Rush tells me as he embarks on his fifth pre-season as a full-time referee. “The only one I dreaded was the first, having been part-time and training off my own back. We’re working with the lads for 46 weeks and then have six weeks away, so we’re keen to get back among it.”

The documentary shows that full-time refereeing is a close facsimile to playing the sport. The need to be as fit as players has turned most refs into gym bunnies. They have to be on the spot to make decisions in a calm and considered manner, even if they have just sprinted 80 metres in the 80th minute. Bentham heads a group of coaches, physios, strength and conditioning experts, masseurs and analysts almost identical to a professional rugby club.

“I do some training with my brother, Kieran [the Huddersfield and Jamaica player] in the off-season and we’re pretty even in fitness and strength,” Rush says. “The physical side and the testing is probably similar. The main difference is the contact that teams do. They spend hours in the wrestle room. We replace that by watching loads of videos of games. We even do some ball skills in small-sided games to replicate the speed of a game. We basically do everything but the tackling.”

Having been shot in the chest while serving as a marine in Afghanistan and spending two weeks in a coma, a gruelling pre-season is unlikely to concern Jack Smith. Taking a refereeing course at 21 as part of his rehabilitation transformed his life. Smith was one of the first career referees. Before full-time referees were introduced in 2007, even elite match officials had main jobs: engineers, police officers, teachers.

The film shows the amusing retirement ceremony of Ben Thaler, one of the old-school referees who is now Rush’s coach. His fair, firm and funny style is rarely seen now at elite level. Unsurprisingly, millennial refs control games in a different manner to their predecessors. “We will see characters come through but how you ref depends on preference,” says Rush. “Because of the pressure TV exposure and social media brings, we want to go under the radar if we can. We don’t want to be soundbites.”

Having playing experience helps. Moore and his younger brother Aaron were both junior talents, while Tara Jones – the only woman in the group – was winning trophies with St Helens only a few months earlier. “I speak to players how I think they’d want to be spoken to,” says Rush. “I know how my brother and his teammates react when refs act a certain way. Players are very different now. We’re all relatively young – the referee is not a lot older than the players like he used to be. They see us as their peers.”

That’s literally the case for Rush. Born in 2000, the youngest of the full-time referees took his first professional game while still a teenager and was just 21 when he joined the Full Time Match Officials squad. Smith and James Vella – both 36 – are only a year older than veteran players Alex Walmsley and Liam Farrell. Having a brother in Super League means Rush knows many players personally.

The film shows Kendall growing up as part of a passionate Bradford-supporting family, cheering the Bulls on at Wembley in their Awesome Foursome heyday. Yet the sport has to operate on the assumption all officials are neutral. With a pool of only around a dozen possible Super League referees and seven games a weekend, the RFL does not have the luxury of keeping refs away from their local or childhood clubs.

“We all started as passionate fans so have a history of supporting a club,” says Rush, who hails from Batley. “But if we couldn’t ref every team we used to support, we’d be stuck: there’s not enough of us! If we did have the hometown rule it would make it easier with the fans’ perceptions but we just don’t have that luxury.”

With family conflicts declared, Rush is glad he has swerved the potentially “difficult position” of refereeing Kieran in a competitive game, although the RFL did grant their wish two years ago for their mum, Louise, who had stage-four cancer, to see them on the field together for a pre-season friendly. You will need tissues for the scene when Louise presents Liam with his Super League refereeing shirt before his debut. “You’ve done it,” she says. Louise died weeks later.

In the sanctuary of the dressing room, referees check their phones straight after matches hoping to see messages from family rather than social media feedback. In the opening game of 2024, Moore had to apply the new high-tackle protocols and send off two players in the Hull derby, to the dismay of many fans, viewers and broadcasters. He spoke with absolute confidence that he was right, the film re-enforcing senior referees’ reputations as authority figures fuelled by self-belief.

Inevitably, not all referees agree on what decisions should be made. “There are lots of opinion-based calls and sometimes there’s a 50-50 split,” says Rush. “That’s when Phil comes in and tells us when it’s OK to have different opinions and when we need to have a united voice because we’ve decided as a group that is how we’re going to referee.”

While speeding up the video referee process next season will be welcomed, Rush deflects the blame for the annual early season clampdowns. “We’re the public-facing side of the governing body,” he says. “For example, we got told by the RFL where we needed to get to regarding head and shoulder on head contact. We didn’t get much debate on that.

“A lot comes from the pre-season meetings with head coaches. Like with the play-the-ball: it was suggested we penalised every time even if there was minimal effect. Then a few weeks later it was decided – not by us – to draw back on that. We don’t just sit in a room and think: ‘It would be really fun to penalise every time someone commits an offence.’ We just deliver what we are told to.” Self-defensiveness is probably inevitable, but Rush explains the decision-making process often prevents officials from admitting the nuance and doubt most of us see in every scrutinised decision.

The video referee role is just as tough. “When a call comes up to you, sitting in the box at Wilmslow, you’re thinking: ‘Please let it be clear one way or the other,’” says Rush. “We work on sufficient evidence but sufficiency is very objective. As video refs our mics are live as soon as it goes to us. That makes it difficult as you want to just think, but you’ve got to talk through the whole thing. So you use open questions: ‘Has he got that ball down?’ If we instantly said what we thought then watched another angle and it was the complete opposite, we’d undermine the credibility. Ideally we’d just decide, then show the angle that proves it.”

Spending every Monday and Tuesday in Manchester means geography can be a barrier – there has not been a French referee in Super League since Ben Casty retired three years ago – and the job has a huge impact on social life too. “That’s another difference between us and the teams,” says Rush, who is doing an accountancy course in his rare spare time.

“They know their fixtures months in advance, whereas we normally find out on Monday afternoon. The only guaranteed day off is a Wednesday. If someone asks to go out for a meal in four weeks’ time, I have to say: ‘Just book me on, I’ll pay the deposit and let you know on the Monday.’ You might wait three or four weeks for a free weekend. We all have families that sacrifice a lot for us. There are tough times.”

So if you happen to bump into a top referee out and about over Christmas, remember they are just a rugby league nut like you, having a rare weekend off. Send them festive cheer.

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