The Birmingham County Womens Walking Football league present a fair play award in each division to 1 team nominated by the rest of the teams in their division who they feel has conducted themselves in the fairplay spirit of the season - not sure if would call it a scheme though ..

Thanks and interesting, we were more thinking about factual evidence based on match reports from refs over the whole season....

Thats interesting too - let us know if you have any further details, thanks

As a referee I’ve been asked about fair play awards during tournaments (as opposed to a league competition) and I always found it a little difficult to really know how to approach it? 

It very often turned out that the team who were perhaps on the end of a few heavy defeats but kept going received the nominations ‍♂️when of course the team that achieved the most victories may well have played sportingly as well. 

Perhaps a potential way of truly reflecting fair play over a season is recording of blue/red cards awarded alongside team penalties accrued for not walking. That way a referee need only record and submit those details alongside the match result and thus take out the sympathy vote? 

Thanks, as always Mick - we are actually looking at using the refs score cards to record blue/red cards and penalties for cumulative running, but some on the committee actually want to go into more detail and count contact fouls as well...

Personally, perhaps going too far when you consider a contact free kick may be awarded for something that is only a low level careless challenge which had absolutely no deliberate intention involved? 

If there is a lot of contact offences during a game perhaps the refs should look for a card for persistent offending ? 

Interesting concept and wouldn’t it be brilliant if the team that wins the championship also wins the fair play , showing that it can be done without pushing the boundaries 

My view entirely about contact free kicks and their level of severity.  My personal view is that it should just be blue cards that count and persistent deliberate contact gets captured that way - and penalties for non-walking, but as said previously others on committee seem to want to 'double-count' offences, so count all fouls and blue cards and also count each individual running offence!

We have a FPA in Cornwall. Started last season and carried on this season. We rarely have cards so that was a non starter. Last season we asked the refs to mark each team out of 5 based on some criteria we previously discussed and agreed at refs meetings. This we found had too many teams too close come end of season. So marking is now out of 10. For each team for each game. We felt it worked reasonably well. Obv some inconsistency between refs but when isnt there? It has little to no effect on player behaviour. 

Interesting - we have just told our referees that they need to be more vigilant around persistent contact offences etc and issue more blue cards where appropriate..to date I think they have been reluctant....we are also considering including countingh the number of penalties award for 4 non-walking offences as an additional marker

TBF to our teams 99% of the time they are a joy to ref. I've only ever issued a red under DOGSO. once. Blues for SPA and USB once. Honestly it is really rare. Pens for team offence are also not very common these days. And this is not because we are lax. I think we are pretty strict. Contact is almost unheard of and very rare too. But within our criteria any cards would involve a downgrading as would also the not walking count. I think perhaps we are just lucky. then again I've not managed to ref yet this season and we did put a lot of work into educating clubs 2 years ago before season started by visiting every single club. So maybe that is part of why we have reasonably well behaved boys and girls.