As much progress as Major League Soccer makes, what with Beckham at L.A. and other international stars hinting that they might like to come over here to play—Thierry Henry for one—there is still one weakness that has not changed in almost ten years. It is the quality of the refereeing. And many observers have been saying that the league will stagnate unless it does something about its officiating.

The comments come from so many different participants in the sport–fans, players, referees, writers, coaches, commentators—that you’d think that by now the league would have taken notice. But no, their collective heads remain firmly embedded in the sand.

Here’s an example that came as an e-mail to me in the last day or two, from someone who referees, instructs referees, watches games at all levels, and who wants to enjoy watching the pros. His comments speak for themselves:

One of the difficulties we face as referees and as instructors is the visibility of professional games where players create new norms for bad behavior (think of Wayne Rooney’s in-the-face applause a couple of years back), and referees do not administer the game as we are taught.

As a referee attempting to officiate matches that are enjoyable to players and spectators, I stop this when I see it. Once or twice I have even had to eject high-level amateur players for repeated cautions, as they mimicked this behavior. When they see a glaring difference between the officiating in a professional game and their own semi-professional match, the natural assumption is that what you see on TV is how it is supposed to be. A US FIFA referee, working a playoff game in our top professional division must know how it is done, right?

Yes, he must, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that he did not enforce the laws, because someone in the league had instructed him not to. If he did his duty, he would have issued yellow cards, which might result in a player or players having to sit out a game. There are some in MLS who do not want players, especially star players, to have to sit out games at this time of the season.

As anyone who understands this game will tell you, that attitude is a perversion of the way that the game is supposed to be played—is played elsewhere in the world—and MLS hurts its reputation by allowing it to persist. Where are the referees with courage?

In news reports of matches, readers are subjected to opinions of varying quality, especially in discussion of the laws of the game. The “denial of a goal-scoring opportunity” is especially contentious because it involves a player getting sent off.

Here is a classic that has all the elements that a referee must use before he pulls the red card. I thought you’d enjoy it, and since I know the referee, honest and true to the game, I couldn’t resist putting it up.

• It is a clear foul, in this case holding an opponent, eventually pulling him to the ground.

• The attacker had passed the defender, was heading toward the goal and had only the goalkeeper to beat.

• No other defender could have reached the attacker to challenge him.

• The attacker had the ball within his playing distance and under control (or would have if the defender hadn’t pulled him off it).

Despite all this, the foolish commentator spouts out that he didn’t agree with sending the player off ! He is Richard Broad, who was working for the Big Ten network. I wonder which of the above he disagreed with . . . based upon his years of experience refereeing at the highest level of course.

The referee is Rich Grady, who represented the United States as a FIFA referee a few years ago.

Historians tell us that in centuries past, some absolute rulers adopted a somewhat enlightened attitude to their vassals. Dictators they may have been, but benevolent ones who actually did some good things for their subjects. They were known as well, benevolent dictators or enlightened absolutists, and one of them, Emperor Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire, described his reign as “Everything for the people, nothing by the people.” You may have seen a caricature of him in the movie “Amadeus”, when he pronounced that memorable advice: “Too many notes, Mozart, too many notes.”

Many observers will say that even today, centuries later, we have a benevolent dictator in our midst, and he runs world soccer. They refer to Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the Swiss who runs the Federation Internationale Football Association (FIFA). Dictator he certainly is, trying to put his personal stamp on the world’s most popular game. Occasionally he is right, but too many times he comes across as a real numpty (a popular Scottish word to describe someone who embarrasses himself because of his own ignorance). Here’s a few of his best.

In 2004 he suggested that women players should have more feminine (read: skimpier) kit to increase the popularity of their game. That comment created uproar in the women’s game, needless to say. For the head of FIFA to suggest that players should be concerned about how they look, and not how they play, is the remark of a right numpty. Then he made himself look even more dumb when he added: “. . . they already have some different rules to men - such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?” (The ball is the same in men’s and women’s soccer.)

In the 2006 World Cup, after Australia were knocked out by Italy on a controversial late penalty-kick, he caused another brouhaha by publicly declaring that the penalty shouldn’t have been called. “I would like to apologize to our fans in Australia. The Socceroos should have gone into the quarter-finals in place of Italy . . .” This, from a man who never refereed at any decent level!

Not too many months later, in January of this year, he created more controversy when as a guest speaker on the eve of the election of a new president for UEFA, he came out and in his speech, publicly supported his long-time ally, Michel Platini, the great French midfielder. Would anyone in the audience dare to vote for the other candidate after that endorsement by the guy who controls the money? Conflict-of-interest rules apparently don’t apply when you are a dictator holding sway over 207 national associations which are members of FIFA. (The United Nations have only 192.) But his blathering didn’t stop there.

Somewhere he had developed the idea that for medical reasons it would be a good thing to ban matches at high altitude. That doesn’t affect many countries except some south American and Andean ones: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and the place where Mexico play difficult matches (Toluca). It didn’t matter to the enlightened despot that there is no medical evidence of danger in playing a soccer match at eight or nine thousand feet, and it was only after outrage from the countries concerned, that a month later, FIFA rescinded the ban.

Blatter was made to look even more foolish when to emphasize the silliness of the original decision, the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, not only personally challenged the ruling in a meeting with FIFA’s caudillo, but traveled up to 6000 meters (almost 20,000 feet) with some of his staff and played a 15-minute game against some local mountain-dwellers. Morales scored the winning goal and also pronounced that “Wherever you can make love, you can play sports.” But for President Sepp, forced to back down, it was edictus interruptus.

It can’t be much fun being a dictator when no one listens to you. At least no one in the community you rule. Don’t they understand that I was making these suggestions for them? Don’t the women players want to be feminine and get sponsorship from cosmetic and lingerie companies? And why wouldn’t the Europeans want my friend Platini as their boss? I thought everyone would be happy that I supported the underdingos against the Italians, who have won the World Cup before, and it’s not fair for the Brazilians and Argentineans to climb mountains to play. Why don’t they love me and praise me?

Maybe the next thing to do is to take on a more powerful opponent, and show my people that I will protect them. I could imagine Sepp thinking that way, and sure enough, just over a week ago, he decided to take on nothing less than the entire European Union; not UEFA, but the EU itself. He must have thought that each member-nation in UEFA would agree that the most important part of soccer is the international match. If he protects the national teams, surely no one could object to that?

But most experts agree that the highest quality of play is not in internationals, but in international club play, or in national leagues, where the players are together week after week, perfecting their strategy and tactics. Blatter wants to reduce the number of foreign players on each team, for he thinks that that somehow will magically improve the quality of domestic players. “Blatter’s trying to protect the World Cup”, said Arsene Wenger, coach of Arsenal in the Premiership. “I’m trying to protect the quality of the game — they’re not the same thing.” Sometimes Wenger puts eleven foreigners on the field to represent his historic English club. “Do you really think that if I regularly started with five average English players, England would win the World Cup?”

Blatter’s foolishness lies not in his idea about foreigners, an idea which some writers agree with, because they are concerned that (for example) England haven’t been doing too well internationally since 1966. The fallacy in his thinking is that he can make the European Union give up one of the basic principles of its constitution: that labor is free to move about the continent. Fat chance! Blatter thinks that somehow soccer players are not like other employees, or maybe he admires the system in Major League Soccer, where the players sign contracts with the league, not individual clubs. Even Platini, his friend and protégé, thinks Blatter won’t win that fight.

Blatter, however, gave away his true motives for taking on the EU. “Football is strong enough to organize itself,” Blatter said, implying that labor laws should not apply to FIFA. He means that if the European Union backed down, he, the benevolent dictator, would be back in charge of all that he could see. No one in soccer could contradict him, for he and he alone knows what is best. And if you have any doubts about how the Swiss dictator operates, check here.

A popular word among the scribbling classes these days is schadenfreude, the German word for that evil little pleasure we take in someone else’s misfortune. There’s a lot of it going about in the political world, with Democrats delighting in one screw-up after another in the White House’s handling of events in Iraq, just as Republicans rejoiced in the raunchy revelations about Bill Clinton and his favorite intern.

Among spectators of sport there’s never a shortage of schadenfreude, whether secret or openly-displayed, for don’t some fans just love it when an obnoxious athlete gets caught cheating (Barry Bonds comes to mind), or when their envy of a soccer player’s success is soothed by his recurrent injuries that don’t allow him to perform (Beckham comes to mind)? Comeuppance for The Other is great medicine for our own ills.

Just think of poor Jose Mourinho (known to the soccer bloggers of Britain as “Maureen”). A few weeks ago he was near the top of the football world as coach of Chelsea F.C. In a little more than three seasons, he had won two Premier League titles, two League Cups, one FA Cup, one Community Shield and had reached late rounds in the European Championship. Management executives of The Blues (or The Pensioners, as they used to be called) described him as “the most successful manager the club has known”. He had no worries, mate.

Yet by Thursday, September 20, after what he admitted was the “most painful moment of my career”, he was gone. As Monty Python would have said, the coach was not pining, he had passed on, he was no more, he was off the twig, he had run down the curtain, joined the choir of coaches invisible, he was an ex-coach. He left with hard feelings and about twenty million dollars. As is the case in all divorces—and this was the mother of all divorces—Maureen’s relationship with the club-owner Roman Abramovich had broken down irrevocably.

Perhaps now, a mere two weeks later, he may be feeling a little better, because things have not gone too well for his successor as coach, Avran Grant. More to the point, the majority of Chelsea’s players were upset that Mourinho was forced out. Leaving the dressing-room for the last time, he gave hugs to 23 players, but not to John Terry, the captain, who had been an agent provocateur in the scheming and stabbing that went on behind Mourinho, nor to Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian striker and former European footballer of the year, who hadn’t played as much as he thought he should. The captain and the striker got only a handshake that according to one observer “could have frozen a mug of tea”.

The ravenous British football press soon got after Grant, whose only success as a coach has been in Israel’s national league, not exactly a powerhouse in European football. Too much energy spent on war, and not enough on sport, perhaps. But it seems that Grant doesn’t have the coaching credentials required by UEFA for anyone taking over a professional top-flight club. Special dispensation will be needed for him to continue.

Then some of the Chelsea players piled in with remarks that Grant’s coaching techniques were 25 years behind the time, that he was an “idiot” and that his appointment to run the star-bright Chelsea team was a “disgrace”. For by then they had seen the new reality in the Stamford Bridge dressing-room, and they didn’t like what they saw . . .

On Tuesday evening, September 18, after the disappointing 1-1 draw with Rosenborg in the European Championship, but before Mourinho was forced out, a new authority appeared in the dressing-room to give instructions to Michael Essien, probably Africa’s finest midfielder. The man stood there with a clipboard lecturing Essien about the distribution of his passes: too many through the center and not enough to the wings. Though the words came out of the mouth of Shevchenko, acting as interpreter, they originated in the mind of the clipboard coach, the billionaire owner of Chelsea F.C., Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich.

So it is beginning to look as though Avram Grant may be Mourinho’s replacement in name only. Will Roman Abramovich run the team, since as one senior player said, he can push the Israeli around “without a hint of respect”?

The early results after the disappearance of Mourinho were not great, and the former boss could be forgiven for any public display of schadenfreude: defeat in Manchester, a draw with Fulham, a win against Hull of a lower division. The club still has difficulty putting the ball in the net, despite Grant and his playing of Abramovich’s favorite, Shevchenko.

Mourinho knows that running a top team is not easy, and he must be happy that Grant wasn’t able to suddenly revitalize the Blues. The win last Wednesday over Valencia in Spain in the European championship was, however, a good one, for that is the competition where the owner’s greatest ambitions lie. Avram Grant will be happy with that result. It might have saved his job.

Writers do like occasionally to slip an alien word into their texts. Perhaps merely an affectation, to the scribe it signals wordliness, linguistic erudition. Schadenfreude is one popular these days, but in this case it has an even more appropriate English equivalent, originating in the delight of spectators at watching the suffering in gladiatorial contests. It is “Roman Holiday”, like the one recently given to Jose Mourinho by well, you know.