Mike Dean interview: Death threats, Arsenal strife and his reputation as a showman referee

“I used to love the grief,” says Mike Dean, leaning back in his chair. “It made me stick my chest out. I’ve given corners before and looked at the crowd, watching them giving me grief, and I’d just smile at them. It winds them up even more.”

Dean, by his own admission, was never just your ordinary referee.

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“If some guy’s giving you proper grief, you just smile and give the thumbs-up. What happens then is that other people will start laughing at him. It makes people realise you are a normal person, even if they hate you for 90 minutes, and at least you have a sense of humour.”

It’s a bright and sunny lunchtime on the Wirral and, first things first, you would never think the man sitting here today has been accused of being a showman, an attention-seeker, or sometimes even worse during a quarter of a century as one of English football’s elite referees.

He turns up in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. He is holding the keys for a Skoda rather than a more fancy motor and his backstory involves several years of combining the demands of a young referee with punishing shifts at a chicken factory in north Wales.

“The chickens came in alive at one end and, by the time they got to us, they weren’t,” he recalls. “We had to take out all their insides. I’d go in at five in the morning, work until two, then go home for a quick change or drive straight to Hartlepool, Carlisle, Lincoln, anywhere, to ref a game. I’d get back at two in the morning and straight into the factory for five. It was hard trying to do both jobs at the same time.”

That level of dedication was essential throughout a refereeing career incorporating nearly 600 top-division matches and several years on FIFA’s international list.

Yet he is talking here as an