Mike Dean divided opinion during two decades as a top-flight referee, but became one of the Premier League’s most unique characters – after all, who else has sent off a player while they were being carried from the pitch on a stretcher? Now retired, the ex-whistleblower sits down to discuss an eventful career
Words Bill Borrows Words Bill Borrows
do speak to players during the game,” reveals Mike Dean, dressed for the summer in T-shirt and shorts, shooting the breeze with FFT in a hotel coffee bar off the M6. “Sometimes if they’ve scored and are too busy celebrating as they jog back to the halfway line, I’ll put a finger to my earpiece and say, ‘Hang on, there’s a VAR check. It might be offside…’”
He chuckles at the memory of it, as that’s exactly what it is – a memory. Since retiring at the end of last season, Dean won’t be doing that any more – or adding to his record number of Premier League red cards, or vexing broadsheet commentators who resented his assessment of himself as an ‘entertainer’. In the deadly dull world of top-flight match officialdom, he almost certainly was.
Alongside the highs and lows of a 22-year career in the Premier League, Dean is ready to clear up once and for all those rumours that he was secretly a diehard Liverpool fan. “The myth was always that when I retired, I was going to get season tickets on The Kop for me and my two sons,” he says. “But I’m a Tranmere fan – and I have two daughters!”
As we speak on this July morning, he’s also ready to name the player who gave him the hardest time, show a casual disregard for stats (“I don’t do them”) and reveal what conversations used to go on in his earpiece.
Present and past tense are interchangeable throughout the conversation, as though the reality of his retirement has yet to fully dawn on him, but also perhaps because towards the end of our chat, he tells us about his new job as part of the Premier League’s VAR team – information that had been embargoed at the time the interview began...
Do you think you were always destined to become a referee?
Not really, I was a fat goalkeeper. I wasn’t the greatest outfield player, so in goal was probably the best place for me. I played to a decent standard, but ended up weighing about 17 or 18 stone when I finished school, couldn’t play football any more, so took up refereeing as a way to get back in the game.
That’s quite hard to imagine – you always appeared to be one of the fitter referees…
I did struggle with my weight and worried about how I looked on television. Since
