When a referee reaches into a pocket during a football match, everyone knows what comes next: a yellow card is a warning, a red card is the end of the game. These two coloured pieces of card are now part of football’s universal language. Yet before 1970 nothing of the sort existed; referees cautioned players verbally and announced dismissals the same way. In international matches, where players and referees often speak different languages, this frequently caused confusion. The solution came to an English schoolteacher-referee while he was waiting in traffic.
Who Was Ken Aston?
Ken Aston (1915–2001) was a primary-school headmaster from Essex and one of FIFA’s leading referees. He qualified as a referee in 1936, served in the British Army during the Second World War, and afterwards continued with both teaching and refereeing. He had already given football several innovations: in 1946 he was the first Football League referee to wear the black referee’s kit, and in 1947, after being unable to see his linesman during a foggy match, he introduced the brightly coloured (red and yellow) linesmen’s flags. Colour-coding was not a new idea for him.
1962: The Battle of Santiago
Aston’s name was first widely noted at the 1962 World Cup in Chile, in the Chile–Italy match that went down in history as the "Battle of Santiago." The game was so violent that police had to come onto the pitch three times; when Aston blew the final whistle he said he had been "refereeing a military manoeuvre, not a football match." The experience kept the question of how to keep order on the pitch alive in his mind.
1966: A Communication Breakdown
The real spark was struck at the 1966 World Cup in England, where Aston was head of the Referees’ Committee. In the England–Argentina quarter-final the German referee could not make himself understood to the Argentine players; one player was sent off for "violence of the tongue" but would only leave the field after Aston intervened. On top of that, after the match it was not even clear whether the England players Jack and Bobby Charlton had been booked — the referee had not made it plain to anyone. Decisions that no one could see were an obvious problem.
The Idea at the Traffic Light
Driving home from Wembley after the match, Aston stopped at a red light on Kensington High Street. As he would tell it years later: "Yellow, take it easy; red, stop, you’re off." The colour logic of traffic lights, which means the same thing everywhere in the world, could cross the language barrier too. When he got home he explained the idea to his wife Hilda; a few minutes later she came back with two pieces of card, one yellow and one red, cut to fit into a shirt pocket.
1970: Onto the Pitch
The yellow and red card system was used for the first time at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The trial was a success: decisions were now clear to everyone, from the spectator in the stands to the television viewer, from the player to the coach. One curious detail: not a single red card was shown at the 1970 tournament — the players were unusually well-behaved. The first red card in World Cup history did not come until 1974, when Chile’s Carlos Caszely was sent off against West Germany for a second yellow.
The Spread of an Idea
From the mid-1970s the card system spread through every level of football and was in time adapted by dozens of other sports: fencing, hockey, volleyball, water polo, handball. Aston served on the FIFA Referees’ Committee for eight years and chaired it for four; the substitute referee (the ancestor of today’s fourth official) and the number board for substitutions are also his. He was appointed MBE in 1997 and spent his last years training young referees in the United States.
Today, when a referee produces a card, we are looking at a simple but ingenious means of communication that has been in use for more than fifty years and was borrowed from traffic lights. A coloured piece of card says the same thing to everyone without knowing any of the dozens of languages that football speaks.