How many football officials are in the US?

[jaybird]

Use this to get an educated guess.

HS-
Take one state at a time. Find out the number of high schools, divide in half then multiply by 5. After doing calulations for each state, add them together.

College-
Get the total number of teams from each conference plus the independants, divide in half then multiply by 7.

This would give a pretty fair estimated total.

[With_Two_Flakes]

You could always ask Referee magazine. In the past they have published numbers of officials in various sports in the US.

About Referee


If you care about Europe, we use NCAA Rules, rough numbers that may be a couple of years out of date......

Austria 50
Belgium 20
Czech 20
Denmark 200
Finland 150
France 300
Germany 880
Ireland 10
Italy 100
Netherlands 40
Norway 50
Poland 15
Russia 10
Spain 50
Sweden 250
Switzerland 50
United Kingdom 100

However what you have to understand about officiating in Europe is that for many countries the only way they get enough officials to cover games is to force teams to to supply 2 or 3 guys each year to officiate.
So the figure of 250 for Sweden for example sounds high, in reality the number of neutral officials who are not press-ganged team members is probably less than 50.

UK does not currently use this type of system (but may in the near future) and has about 100 officials of whom maybe 70 working regularly.

[OverAndBack]

There are 718 football officials registered with the Arizona Interscholastic Association as of this morning.

[ajmc]

I submit the more practical answer, especially in those States where 3, 4 and even 5 man crews deal with JV and/or varsity HS football, is simply, "not enough".

The combination of the game's popularity continuing to expand, with more schools introducing the game to more levels, where expectations of perfection, although publicly recognized as unreachable, continue to expand while the number of experienced (competent) officials is either stagnant or dwindling is an accident waiting to happen, where it hasn't already begun.

[scboa11]

There are about 630 high school football officials in South Carolina