THE REF - Football Referee Simulator · published
You are on the pitch, so the ball can hit you — and now that matters.
If the ball strikes you and rolls harmlessly back to the same team, play continues. But if the deflection changed the game, the ball was out of play the moment it touched you, and the restart is a dropped ball. Three situations count:
You whistle it. A window opens — the same length you get for a foul — and SPACE awards the dropped ball, to the team that had the ball before the deflection. Inside the penalty area it goes to the defending keeper, with opponents backing off.
Miss the window and play carries on with the wrong team in possession: a real refereeing error, and it costs you.
The one call the game makes for you is the ball going straight in. "Play on" isn't an option there, so the goal is disallowed automatically and the drop follows.
It used to be silent. Now there's a thud, you physically recoil, and the feed tells you what happened. Your body is also the right size — it was stopping balls a real official would never touch, and could bounce the same ball off you repeatedly. Contacts are down from around 5 a match to about 1, which is roughly what real football looks like.
The four floodlight towers were scenery. Night matches didn't turn them on — they dimmed the daylight, so every floodlit game was a dark, blue-tinted version of a day match. Pitch markings rendered slate-grey and the referee's own black kit was a silhouette.
The masts now emit real light. Markings read white again, the ball is trackable, and the corners and stands fall away into shadow the way a floodlit ground should. Tuned across every stadium tier, from the park pitch up to the national bowl.
This matters most in the cups: every cup tie and every final is played under lights.
Thanks for the feedback.