Ex-EFL and non league player becomes assistant referee and member of Met Police riot squad

Ex-EFL and non league player Steve Parmenter becomes an assistant referee and is also a member of the Met Police riot squad.

He started out at schoolboy football level with Cambridge United and Ipswich Town before spending two years in the Southend United youth system.

He was signed by Queens Park Rangers in 1995 and won a Football Combination league title with their reserve team, but never made an appearance for the first eleven.

He signed for Bristol Rovers in the summer of 1996 and made his senior debut as a substitute against Stockport County on the 31st of August, in a game which also marked Rovers’ first match back in Bristol after ten years of playing their home matches in Bath.

After his spell in Bristol ended in 1998, Parmenter played for a number of non league clubs, most notably for Canvey Island where he spent six years and earned an FA Trophy-winner’s medal in 2001.

Following his footballing career, he trained as a match official and as of 2020 was working as an assistant referee, officiating in Premier League 2, National League, and FA Women’s Super League matches.

Since 2015 he has been an officer in the Metropolitan Police.

“I’m an assistant referee, or what you’d call a lino in old money,” Parmenter says. “At a certain point, you choose if you want to be in the middle or on the line. I felt that there was a better chance for me to get to the Football League as an assistant referee.

“When I first took it on and had the PFA and PGMOL backing me, the help I was getting was fantastic. I thought if I could sit down one day and say I was one of a few who has refereed and played in the Football League then that would be a great thing to be able to say.

“I’m one promotion away, but it’s tough because each year there’s no set number that they recruit for promotion, so you’ve got to be on it every week.”

Between shifts with the police, Parmenter is assessed in every match by former UEFA and FIFA referees who give feedback and report back to those who determine whether he gets promoted within the job. 

“Now I understand what referees go through, I know I must have been a horrible player,” he says. “I wasn’t abusive but I was on them every game, looking for something to say — ‘You owe us one’, or, ‘You got that wrong’. Just chipping away.

“But the abuse doesn’t bother me, the managers having a go doesn’t bother me, because at the end of the day the only person in the crowd that you need to impress is the one giving you the score. The winning team will love you and the losing team will have lost because of you. It’s sad, but it’ll never change.

“When I’m at work and you’re dealing with a large public order situation where you’re getting stuff pelted at you, and you have your mates pulling you left, right and centre, getting called a twat by 500 Yeovil fans just doesn’t matter. It does not bother me in the slightest. I get it every day if I stop-and-search people, it’s water off a duck’s back when I’m in the riot squad.

“Being an ex-player has really helped because sometimes teams have felt they were getting a decent ref that day because they know who I am. But sometimes, players will turn around and say, ‘Have you ever played football before?’. That’s the best one, it kills me that. If I know the manager, I’ll tell the player to ask their manager if I’ve played football before and come back to be after.

“I don’t like using that card but sometimes it does happen if there’s a young kid giving me some grief.”

A midfielder or striker, Parmenter made two appearances for Wales at under-21s level and won the 2000-01 FA Trophy with Canvey Island, the Essex club where he took the first step in his officiating career following a dispute with a ref during a game.

“There’s an ex-ref called Phil Crossley and when I played, he was the best referee by a country mile,” Parmenter says. “Every time I turned up to a game and he was the ref, I was happy.

“He had good banter with us, used to laugh and joke with us and give you something back. At one point, I must have said something or other to him and he said I needed to go and learn the laws of the game and then go back to him. So I thought, ‘Well, OK, I will!’, but I don’t know what came over me to actually go and do it — maybe it’s because I was getting a bit older and thought I’d just try it.

“I naively felt that, because I was a player, I would be able to jump in at Ryman League level (the seventh and eighth tiers of English football) and it would be easy, but it’s really not.

“I’m a Chelmsford boy, born and bred, and went over to one of the most notorious parks in Chelmsford, where you’re cleaning up dog mess before the game and there’s broken bottles on the pitch. It’s not a very nice place. But I was running around and controlling this game of football and, bizarrely, loved it.”

“I think all academy kids should learn the laws of the game, because it helps,” he says on wanting to help others become referees especially with the shortage of those in non league and grassroots. “I’ll go and talk to some kids at top academies and say they should think about refereeing and they just laugh at you, because they all think they’re going to be the next Frank Lampard. So you’ll never get to them; lower-league players you might. But as a minimum, all players should know the laws of the game. They think they do but they haven’t got a clue.

“My advice would be that if you’re decent at football but might not get a career out of it and want to stay in the game, then try refereeing. We’re desperate for referees and if you’re half-decent, you’ll get good promotions as they need them up the pyramid. I played until I was 32, which is still young to retire, and there is no better feeling in the world than playing football.

“But if I had retired and turned to refereeing earlier, then I might have got a bit further and might (now) be in the Football League or higher.

“The promotion process for me, realistically, will only get me as high as League One and League Two because I’ve come to it later — then I’ll be done and happy. Even if I don’t get to that level, I’m still happy.”