THE Football Association has laid out plans to recruit 2,000 referees from under-represented groups by 2026.

The governing body unveiled its new three-year strategy for grassroots refereeing today, with a target to improve diversity among officials at its heart.

The FA is committed to a net increase of 1,000 women referees and 1,000 black or Asian referees in the overall system in three years’ time, equivalent in both cases to a 50 per cent increase.

It also wants to ensure the proportion of referees from under-represented ethnicities and women operating within the men’s professional game is equal to the proportion of black and Asian/women referees nationally by 2026.

Currently 8 per cent of officials overall are of black or Asian ethnicity, but it is only 3 per cent in the professional game. Eight per cent of officials overall are women, compared to 2.5 per cent in the professional game.

The target by 2026 is to bring that level at 10 per cent, in both under-represented groups.

The FA hopes to achieve this by, among other things, delivering national recruitment campaigns, launching a bursary scheme to part-fund places on entry-level referee courses for officials from under-represented groups and targeting proportional representation of gender and ethnicity on its Centre of Refereeing Excellence (CORE) structure.

The strategy also seeks to halve the time it can take for referees to reach the top levels from the grassroots game.

The FA is aiming to make three years the potential time it takes to go from starting out in grassroots to refereeing in the National League, with mid-year promotions and increased investment in referee development among the methods being used to speed the process up.

Currently it takes seven years.

It is also targeting a 25 per cent reduction in the time it takes to reach the men’s professional game from taking the entry-level course, from 15 years down to 11 years.

The FA also sees improving the experience of referees by reducing the levels of abuse they are subjected to as key to the strategy’s success.

A bodycam trial launched last season will continue through 2023-24, while teams will face points deductions from the start of the season where their players or coaches commit repeated offences of serious misconduct.

Anti-discrimination charity Kick It Out welcomed the initiatives concerning diversity and said: “Improvement has been desperately needed in this area to ensure referees from all backgrounds have the same opportunities to develop from grassroots to elite level and we are encouraged to see positive steps by football’s governing bodies to drive change.

“But it’s important to remember that targets are only a benchmark for what the industry should want to achieve.

“The recent appointment of Sam Allison and Rebecca Welch to Championship level and Akil Howson to referee’s assistant in the Premier League for the upcoming season will provide welcome role models for a new generation of referees.”