Bibi and Howard, a referee love story of married former cops, both of whom have refereed a World Cup final and a UEFA Champions League final. This is a story about two of the world’s best-known referees, both children of referee fathers, who have deeply philosophical views on their professions and are actively engaged in taking their sport to the next level. It’s also a love story.
What drew Bibi to Howard?
“I love how Howard is taking care of people,” she says, “how he interacts with the people who are close to him, family, and friends or in his working relationships, how he treats people. H is always very, very fair, very transparent in what he does. You can totally read him, and when you ask him a question, he would never lie to you.” She looks at her husband and cackles. “And he’s a freaking hot guy.”
And what drew Howard to Bibi?
“It's interesting with Beebs,” he says in his British baritone. “She’s very striking. I like the fact that she has shown so much determination and against the odds has been incredibly successful. They’re the superficial things that attracted me to Bibi, but when you meet her there’s so much more than that. She’s got a huge heart, she’s a proper girl” - she laughs out loud at this one - “and she’s loyal and thoughtful. You think strong German dominant character, and she is that sometimes. If somebody is trying to get off the plane quickly and climb over you, the German will come out.”
How did you meet?
Back in 2007, Webb first heard of a female referee who had started working in the German men’s second division. He remembers asking his English refereeing colleague Martin Atkinson, who was also a police officer, after he had returned from the World Police Games: Did you meet Bibi Steinhaus? Atkinson had. “She was a bit of an icon in our little referee world,” Webb says. “So, I knew of her, but I had never met her.” That changed in 2013 in Rome. For the first time, UEFA invited top female referees to its twice-per-year seminar with their male colleagues. Webb remembers walking toward the hotel lobby, encountering Steinhaus with some female colleagues and introducing himself. “Hi, Bibi, nice to meet you,” he said. “My name’s Howard Webb.” “Hi, I know who you are,” she said. And that was that. “I was a bit of a nerd,” he says now. What stood out the most at that seminar, they both say, was the influence the women had on the interactions. “It’s a pretty big statement from the confederation to acknowledge that the women should be treated equally to the men, and they want to run this together for the benefit of both,” Bibi says. “Knowing both worlds inside-out, I would say the women’s perspective could learn a lot from the guys regarding professionalism, but the guys can pick up a lot from the social awareness and responsibility the women are having.” They recall the dynamic of the analytical discussions changing, too. As Webb says, “I remember sitting with Damir Skomina or Viktor Kassai or Cüneyt Çakir or Björn Kuipers, and we would say, ‘What do you think? Depends on the score, on the context of the game, on how I’m feeling, or how the players are feeling.’ And the women would say, ‘It was a red card. It was red.’” Steinhaus-Webb nods. “We were like, ‘Speed, point of contact, intensity of the challenge, pull a red card. Next.’ And the guys were like, ‘Oh, okay.’ This is nothing like they would have expected, I guess.” “Yeah,” Webb says. “And the women are very outspoken,” she continues. “So, if you ask them for their opinion, you get the opinion, and it's a lot of interaction. They don’t buy into everything. It's always, ‘Why do you think that way? What are your considerations? You have to convince me.’ It's a great challenge for both sides to think about the process as much as the actual result, or both together, basically.” “The women have to be quite strong characters to get to elite level,” Webb adds. “They have to go through some difficulties. It was interesting about you being more forthright than I am, for sure.” “That’s true!” she says, smiling. They connected again at the same UEFA seminar a year later, this time in Lisbon, and posed for their first photograph together when they received the respective IFFHS awards for 2013 world male and female referees of the year. They kept in touch occasionally, and in late 2015 Webb contacted her saying he had an eight-hour layover in Frankfurt one Sunday and inviting her to dinner. “To be fair, I would not have made the effort going all the way from Hannover to Frankfurt, which is three and a half hours, to meet you for dinner,” she says. “Probably not.” “Really?” he says. “Today I would say, ‘What a chance!’” she says. “But I have to say, six years ago I would probably not have thought about that. Anyway, it ended up that I had a match on Sunday in Frankfurt, totally by chance. And I said, ‘Seven o’clock is fine. I have final whistle at five. I can make that, no problem.” The soccer-viewing world remembers that day as the one when Steinhaus sent off Fortuna Düsseldorf’s Kerem Demirbay, who turned back and said to her: “Women have no place in men’s soccer.” She included the comment in her match report, which resulted in Demirbay receiving a five-game suspension. But for Bibi and Howard, the lasting memory of that day was their dinner in Frankfurt. “I took the train back to Hannover, and Howard took the train back to the airport, and this was the moment I realized the world was different,” she says. Webb was in the final days of his marriage, and he told his wife, Kay, and their three teenaged children that he was moving to Hannover to live with Steinhaus. “Our relationship had changed, but we are still fine now, and it’s okay,” he says of his former wife. “The kids are fine. But like any breakup, it’s painful. [My relationship with Steinhaus] didn’t come out in the media [for a year], but Bibi and I weren’t hiding it.” The elite refereeing community is a small subculture, and Bibi and Howard say mutual friends were concerned they wouldn’t last as a couple, and that a breakup would be messy as colleagues. “But we were obviously going to stay together, and we knew that from early on,” he says. “They didn’t know you in the same way that I do,” she says.
They’ve been together ever since, even after Webb moved to the U.S. for his PRO job in March 2017. Later that year, Webb was on hand in Berlin when Steinhaus made history by becoming the first female to referee a men’s Bundesliga game. He still recalls driving her from Hannover the day before on the Autobahn, where he forgot that the left lane had no speed limit and nearly got rear-ended by a sports car going 180 miles per hour. (“I almost stopped your career before it started in the Bundesliga,” he cracks.) Hertha Berlin offered half-price “Bibiana tickets” to female fans that day. “I’m there in the stadium supporting her, and I’m shitting myself,” Webb says. “I know what it’s like to referee in the top division of a country. Not only has Bibi got the pressure of it being her first game in the top league, she’s got the entire responsibility of female officiating on her shoulders. Because if she messes that up, the next chance for a woman is being pushed right down the track.” “You realize that you have a lot of responsibility,” Bibi says of that day. “You probably don’t think about it too much, because otherwise you’ll never get out there and referee, right? My way of dealing with pressure was that I was always really well-prepared. We take 300 decisions per match, and the likelihood that one of them might be wrong is pretty high. You just hope it’s one of these minor decisions, like a throw-in on the halfway line. If you feel you prepared in the best way you can, if you know you have a strong team with you, then you have to go and kick off the game. The dish is made, you just have to eat it at some point.” Steinhaus’s first Bundesliga game went off without a hitch. The next day, a German newspaper ran a photo of the couple with the caption: “Bibi Steinhaus has arrived in the Bundesliga, and she’s even got Howard Webb as a bag-carrier.” She ended up calling 23 Bundesliga games before retiring as a referee in August 2020 after working the German men’s Super Cup between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. On 26 March 2021, in Germany, Bibi and Howard got married in a ceremony that, due to Covid, didn’t include wedding guests. Her ring just arrived from England that morning due to tax delays from Brexit, and they had to rush to city hall for the proceedings, which started two minutes behind schedule. “A late kickoff,” Howard says, beaming. His German didn’t fail him, and he knew when to say “ja” at the right moment.
The wavelength that Bibi and Howard are on is almost eerie. “On the field, we’re very similar in terms of the way we refereed, just trying to read players,” Howard says. “I don’t want to offend you, but I don’t think either of us were the best …” “... technical…” Bibi says. “... technical decision-makers,” says Howard. “That’s true.” “We just smelled what had to be done. I used to watch Bibi on TV, on Bundesliga games, and there’d been a possible foul, there’d be an appeal I think, and then Bibi hit the whistle. Fully accepted on the field. I thought, Bibi’s not really seeing that, she’s just smelled what to give. You know what I mean? And that was a great skill, wasn’t it?” She nods. For all their similarities, though, they come to the sport in completely different ways. “I am just a football nut, you know what I mean?” Howard says. He’s a lifelong fan of Rotherham United, currently in League One, and the England national team. “We beat Germany 2-0 in the Euros,” he says. “It was a great moment. I would really care if England had lost to Germany. It would hurt me for a few days. Bibi was very magnanimous about it, because she doesn’t really care too much.” “As long as the referee is doing well, I don’t care,” she says.
Unlike in most professional sports, soccer’s rules are called the Laws of the Game. That isn’t just a linguistic quirk. The number of soccer referees who also work as police officers is large, and fans might be surprised to learn that even elite referees like Bibi and Howard usually still have to work at least part-time to earn a full income. Howard finished his police career as a uniformed beat sergeant in Sheffield only in 2014 after spending 20 years on the job. Bibi, a chief inspector in her Hannover regional department, ended her 23-year police career just last Friday. “Leaving the police to do something totally different is so far out of my comfort zone,” says Bibi. “Until the last day, Howard said, ‘I never thought, not in a million years, that you would really leave your police job.’” “I was surprised. But I’m glad.” “I surprised myself a little bit, probably.” Were their law enforcement jobs ever dangerous? “We were both generalists,” Howard says. “We weren’t in specifically dangerous roles in the police, but just generically being a cop is a little bit dangerous, because you’re going toward a situation when other people are moving away.” “This really goes to my heart,” Bibi says, “because I think we as a society don’t necessarily appreciate the work police officers are doing. We don’t appreciate the work of what referees are doing in the same way. Like people stopping ambulances from getting to the places where they should be, or like the social media abuse on different sports people who are willing to be responsible and to take actions. Argh! This really gets under my skin, and I think we have to work together to get more appreciation for what people do for this society.” Howard is a firm believer in the British phrase policing with consent: the idea that society wants you to police it, to protect it, to bring some level of mutually-agreed-upon order without going over the top. Likewise, he thinks soccer players want a strong referee, someone to take control of the game. “There’s loads of similarities between what we did as police officers and what we did on the field,” Howard says. “Just mediating all the time, communicating, having confidence when you’re probably not that certain of something, but trying to give the perception that you are confident. All those things that served us both well as cops translating onto the field. Undoubtedly, if you’re working a late night in the city center of Hannover or Sheffield and you’ve got drunk people wanting to fight, and you actually don’t really want to arrest them because that’s going to take you off the street, you want them to get into a cab and go home. It’s similar to trying to get two players to calm down who want to fight.” Do you bring order to your disagreements any differently from a non-referee couple? They laugh. “We don’t yellow card each other,” Howard says. “No,” cracks Bibi. “And we don’t handcuff each other either!” “Having empathy in a relationship means that we don’t argue that often,” Howard says. “We don’t get to a situation where we’re in a deadlock, if you like. We have a rule in our relationship that whatever happens, we always say I love you and kiss each other good night,” Bibi says. “And we do.”
