Microphones on officials changed how decisions get explained

Broadcasting a referee's reasoning was sold as transparency, and it has made the explanation part of the officiating itself.

Put a microphone on a referee and something odd happens to the job. The decision is the same. The account of the decision is now a performance, delivered live, to an audience that includes the players, both benches, a stadium and a broadcaster who will replay the clip for a week.

Sports that have done this properly, rugby among them, get real value from it. You hear the reasoning, you hear the question asked of the video official, you hear a standard being applied. That is a genuine gain, and it makes the argument afterwards more informed than it would otherwise be.

The unintended part is the pressure it puts on articulacy.

A referee who makes a correct call and explains it badly now looks worse than one who makes a poor call fluently. Nothing in any rulebook says an official has to be a good broadcaster, but the microphone quietly makes it part of the assessment, and I would bet it already shapes who gets appointed to the biggest fixtures. That is a strange criterion to have introduced by accident.

There is a chilling effect too. An official who knows every word is being carried live is less likely to think aloud, less likely to say I am not sure, less likely to ask the naive question that would actually resolve the incident. The safest thing to say on an open mic is a short, confident formula, and short confident formulas are not always the route to a correct decision.

Then there is the selective release problem. In competitions where the audio is not broadcast live but is published afterwards, somebody decides which conversations are released. Usually the ones that show the process working. Occasionally, under pressure, one that does not, presented as accountability. Selective disclosure by the same body that employs the officials is not accountability, it is public relations with a rulebook in the background.

Publish everything or publish nothing.

If a sport is confident enough to mic its officials, it should be confident enough to hand over the full audio of every review, including the ones where the answer was arrived at slowly and by a route nobody is proud of.

That is what the transparency argument actually implies, and almost nobody accepts it.