Put the referee's microphone on and leave it on

Rugby figured this out a generation ago, football keeps promising it, and the reasons given for holding back are excuses.

Watch a rugby union Test and you hear the referee explain, in real time, why a scrum is being reset and which prop is boring in. Watch a football match and you hear a man in the crowd shouting at nobody.

The argument for opening up officials' audio is not that referees are wonderful communicators. Some are dreadful. It is that hearing a decision explained changes how you feel about it, even when you still think it is wrong. There is a difference between a penalty appearing on screen out of nowhere and a penalty where you heard the official say the defender got the shoulder in first and the contact came afterwards. In the first case you assume incompetence or worse. In the second you disagree with a person doing a job.

The objections are familiar. Officials will be exposed. Some of the language will be industrial. Broadcasters will clip mistakes and run them for a week. All true, and none of it is a reason to keep the audio locked, because the mistakes get clipped and run for a week anyway. The only difference is that at the moment they get clipped without the officials' side of it.

The compromise being trialled in various competitions, where the referee announces a review decision over the stadium public address, is better than nothing and still misses the point. An announcement at the end tells you the verdict. What people want is the process. Which frame was chosen. Whether the video official offered a recommendation or simply invited a look. How long the conversation actually took, and how much of the delay was two people establishing which camera angle even exists.

Cricket, of all sports, has been the model here for twenty years. The third umpire's deliberations are broadcast, the crowd sees the frames, the stump microphone gives you the noise, and the result is that reviews are the most trusted decisions in the game rather than the least. Nobody thinks that system is crooked. They think it is slow.

Football's authorities keep saying transparency is coming. It has been coming for years. Switch the microphone on, accept the first few embarrassing weeks, and the arguments about honesty will mostly stop.