No they’re not. They have both the time and technology to get decisions 100% correct, there is no excuse.
It’s pretty much impossible to get things right 100% of the time in sports like football. Not all camera replays show us exactly what we need to see neither, even with two dozen cameras, we sometimes still don’t get to see the best angle or two different angles will show us two different things.
In that situation where one angle makes it look like someone has been fouled but the other one makes it look like he hasn’t, which one do you choose to follow to make your decision? The one where it looks like he has been fouled could just be showing a falsity where it’s just the angle and distance away from the incident that makes it look like a foul, and vice versa.
Two random fans who are very clued up about the LOTG can still disagree over a decision and justify their point to each other.
In both codes of rugby where the the Bunker (NRL) Video Ref (Super League) or Television Match Official (Rugby Union) are seen as excellently run and implemented, they still get decisions wrong. And you could get two refs from either code who’d disagree with each other over decisions.
I said this in another thread about Prem refs recently;
‘The referees are generally good. They have a very difficult job and get far too much bloody stick. I’d have our Prem refs over the terrible European refs any day.
They could definitely be better. But they’re not helped by wanker footballers constantly cheating, diving, feigning injury, claiming for everything and unrealistic fans who do nothing but complain about them all the time like they have no understanding that there is such a thing as human error and are a bit deluded when it comes to that.
We get the quality of referees we deserve in this sport because of the cheating players and the moaning fans. What sort of person would want to be a ref faced with a load of arseholes like they get from players and fans in football? The talent pool of referees is smaller than it would be if players stopped cheating and fans got real.’
One thing that must happen though is that we need to get all the officials mic’d up in footy. That would make a massive difference in trust.