How a Stoke junior football club cut referee reports about its touchline from 11 to two

Leanne Whitfield is the club secretary at Trentvale Juniors FC in Stoke-on-Trent, which runs 19 teams and 236 players from under-7 to under-16. In March 2025 a 15-year-old referee, one of the club's own, abandoned an under-12 home match after ten minutes of shouting from the touchline and did not referee again that season.

Where the club started

Leanne is a payroll officer at a pottery firm in Burslem who became club secretary in 2023, when both her sons were playing. The club has 41 volunteer coaches and managers, plays home fixtures across two council-owned sites, and holds the FA's Charter Standard, now the England Football Accreditation.

On paper it had everything. In practice nobody used it.

• The parents' code of conduct was a two-page PDF linked from the registration form. Leanne checked the website analytics in April 2025: it had been opened 17 times that season.
• Each team had its own WhatsApp group, the biggest with 58 members. Saturday's arguments about the referee carried on there until Sunday night, in front of every parent in the squad.
• Marshals were required by the league for some age groups but nobody organised them. Most Saturdays, the coach was also the marshal.
• Consequences depended on which committee member heard about it. One parent had been told off three times by three different people, and nothing else had happened.

In the 2024-25 season, referees mentioned Trentvale's spectators in 11 match reports. Two of the club's four youth referees stopped refereeing.

What was actually wrong?

Not the code. The wording was fine. The problem was that nobody could say who had agreed to it, nobody was on duty to uphold it, and nothing happened in the same way twice.

The FA's Respect programme gives clubs the pieces: codes of conduct for parents and spectators, designated spectator areas and marshals. Trentvale had the pieces in a drawer. What it lacked was a record per family, a named person per match, and a ladder the committee had agreed before the next incident rather than during it.

"Every time something happened, we had a committee row about what to do, and by the time we'd decided, it was three weeks later and the parent had forgotten what they'd even said. The ref hadn't forgotten. That's the bit that got me."

What Trentvale set up in Bitir

The committee agreed the new approach in July 2025, using the structure in our guide to parent codes of conduct and touchline behaviour, and the teams moved into Bitir in early August.

1. A private channel per team, replacing the 19 WhatsApp groups. The team manager controls who is in it and can remove a post for everyone.
2. A ten-line code as a versioned joining agreement, sent on 11 August 2025. Every family had to accept the current version before the first fixture, and managers could see who was still pending.
3. A Monday marshal poll in each team's channel for Saturday's home match. The volunteer collects the yellow bib from the container at the ground.
4. A published ladder: a quiet word on the day, a written warning within 48 hours, a four-week matchday ban, then a committee meeting with the family. The child plays at every step.
5. A channel rule: no discussion of referees or other people's children in team channels. Concerns go to the team manager in a private message.
6. Two silent sideline weekends, in October and February, for the under-7 to under-11 teams.

One decision split the committee. Two managers wanted the option to drop a child from the matchday squad if a parent kept offending, because "that's the only thing that works". Leanne argued against it and won the vote nine to three: the ban falls on the adult, and if the family cannot find someone else to bring the child, the club helps arrange a lift.

What changed in the numbers?

Leanne compared 2024-25 with 2025-26, with the same 19 teams and most of the same managers.

By the first fixture on 30 August, 214 families had accepted. The managers phoned the remaining 22 that week, and the last acceptance came in on 4 September, 24 days after the code went out and before the second weekend of fixtures.

The ladder was used less than the committee expected. Marshals gave 23 quiet words across the season, the welfare officer sent three written warnings, and one parent served a four-week matchday ban in November. Nobody reached the fourth step.

The two referees who had stopped did not come back, but the club trained three new youth referees in the spring, and all four current ones are still refereeing Trentvale fixtures.

"The marshal is the bit I'd keep if I could only keep one. A parent will say things to a referee they'd never say to another parent from their own team standing next to them in a yellow bib."

What Leanne does in Bitir

• 19 private team channels, each run by its team manager, with Leanne and the welfare officer able to see all of them.
• A versioned joining agreement carrying the ten-line code, with pending families visible to each manager.
• A weekly poll in each team channel to fill the marshal slot for home matches.
• Private messages for written warnings and follow-ups, so nothing about an individual parent appears in a team channel.
• Post removal by managers, used four times in the season on posts about referees.
• Role permissions so team managers run their own team and the committee sees the whole club.

What she would tell another club

• Count how often your code is actually opened. The number ends the "but we already have one" conversation.
• Agree the ladder before the next incident, not during it.
• Never bench the child. Ban the adult instead, and help with the lift.
• Put a named person in a bib on every touchline, every week.
• Take matchday arguments out of the team chat. They only grow there.

What's next

Trentvale is adding an under-18 team and a girls' section next season, and Leanne wants the same code accepted by the older players themselves, not only their parents. The marshal poll is also moving to away matches, after two of the season's quiet words were given by the opposition's marshal.

Related reading: parent codes of conduct and touchline behaviour, and how grassroots football clubs manage squads and parents.