Entscheidungsautoritäten und elementare Akteure des „Weltsports“: Pfade einer Kulturgeschichte der Schiedsrichter

These days, referees and umpires are considered to be indispensable protagonists in modern sport. But despite their crucial significance for sport, historical scholarship has so far hardly considered their history. This article demonstrates why it is worth dealing with the cultural history of referees and umpires, in what ways this can be done, and what insights such an approach potentially offers. Empirically, the article focuses on football and tennis, while advocating the combination of questions of the history of sports with those pertaining to general history. It suggests several paths of investigation for this purpose. One finding is that the history of referees and umpires provides insights into the emergence and development of a decision-making authority in modern societies. Here, different forms and variants of the circulation of knowledge and processes of globalisation can be highlighted. In the second part, the article examines an important building block of this story. Here, the formation and entrenchment of international refereeing courses in football between 1948 and the mid-1970s will bring together the article’s programmatic objectives and empirical observations. It will trace which actors led the charge in establishing the courses, how they fostered the global dissemination and standardization of refereeing knowledge, and to what extent they contributed to expanding the boundaries of world football as a global arena of competitive comparison.