Pep Guardiola had just watched his Manchester City side stroll past Wolverhampton Wanderers in a 2-0 victory last month when there was a swipe at the latest match official to have crossed his path.
“The referee made a huge debut. Now everybody will know him,” said Guardiola, with a smile, in his post-match press conference.
The new kid on the whistle-blowing block was Farai Hallam.
In his first game as a Premier League referee, the 32-year-old chose to stick with his original on-field decision after being summoned to the pitchside monitor by his VAR colleague Darren England. The arm of Wolves defender Yerson Mosquera, Hallam ruled, was in a natural position when handling the ball, dismissing City’s appeals for a penalty and, in the process, irritating Guardiola.
Hallam will have hoped for an introduction without such controversy, but the Premier League rookie did not shy away from scrutiny at the Etihad Stadium that afternoon.
It was the latest, and largest, step in a rapid rise for somebody who was an aspiring apprentice trying to make it as a player with EFL club Stevenage as recently as 2012.
Next for him is the Premier League game between Crystal Palace and Burnley at Selhurst Park tonight (Wednesday), four days after being the fourth official as Arsenal beat Sunderland at the weekend. Friday will then see him take charge of Chelsea’s visit to Hull City of the Championship in the FA Cup fourth round.
Hallam has come a long way, very quickly. Less than three years stood between him taking charge of his first game in the EFL and that Premier League bow at the Etihad, with his rapid progress a measure of his standing within PGMOL, the match officials’ governing body in England.
Farai Hallam refereeing in the Championship at Norwich City this season (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
Hallam’s ability has seen him fast-tracked this far, and Guardiola’s gripe has not altered perceptions of his abilities. A week back in the Championship, overseeing Southampton’s win at Stoke City on January 31, was considered part of his development, rather than a punishment.
Alongside others, such as Thomas Kirk, Hallam is what former World Cup final ref Howard Webb, head of PGMOL, has been looking for since taking up that position in the summer of 2022.
The launch of the Elite Referee Development Plan (ERDP) devised a strategy to accelerate the careers of the best young officials, while also targeting underrepresented groups to improve diversity within the refereeing body. Hallam, whose mother is from Zimbabwe, has previously spoken of his pride in being mixed race.
The Premier League has opened the door to a new wave of officials under Webb, and Hallam, as Guardiola suggested, may soon be a face that plenty of football followers come to know.
The Premier League has had younger officials than Hallam — Michael Oliver and Stuart Atwell both oversaw games aged 25 — but few can have reached the top flight with as little EFL experience.
It was only on the final weekend of the 2022-23 season that he was given a first opportunity to prove himself in League Two, the English game’s fourth tier, taking charge of Walsall’s 2-1 win against Doncaster Rovers. That match was a dead rubber between mid-table sides who would finish 16th and 18th out of 24, nothing more.
Not until the 2024-25 season did progress become tangible, with Hallam given his first League One game in the September and then a first taste of the Championship two months later.
That was one of only 13 games he refereed in the second division that season, but Webb and others at PGMOL had seen enough to include Hallam among six referees on a newly created supplementary list last summer, working between the Championship and Premier League. Kirk, who took charge of his first top-flight game (Palace’s trip to Burnley) in December, was another, along with Lewis Smith, Adam Herczeg, Ruebyn Ricardo and Ben Toner.
Hallam made some bold calls in his Premier League debut at Manchester City last month (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Hallam has spent the past 10 years as a qualified referee, having initially been persuaded to begin an officiating course with the Essex FA in 2015 to better understand his role working in the Football Association’s refereeing department.
That job, based at Wembley Stadium, only came about after Hallam had given up on becoming a professional footballer. A two-year scholarship with Stevenage ended with his release in 2012, and he then headed for Spain, turning out for CF Federico Mayo, a small, semi-professional club based near Cadiz in the southern region of Andalusia.
Ambitions, for a while, had been big. When captaining Stevenage’s youth team as a central defender, he made no secret of his desire to win international honours.
“My dream is to represent Zimbabwe,” he said in a 2011 interview with The Herald, a newspaper based in Harare, that country’s capital. Father, Keith, added that they had gone as far as attending the Africa Cup of Nations in support of Zimbabwe.
Hallam is not alone as a professional referee who was once part of academy football. Simon Hooper, a Premier League official since 2018, was part of Swindon Town’s youth team, as was Sam Allison, who was also on the books of Bristol City and Bournemouth as a youngster.
The time spent with Stevenage, though, is what Hallam credits for a career as an official. “I wouldn’t be a referee if it wasn’t for the academy,” he said in an interview with the EFL last year. “To be a successful player, you need to believe in yourself, and to be a successful referee, even more so. When you’re criticised so often, you have to be resilient to bounce back from setbacks.”
Farai Hallam in 2011 before his release by Stevenage (Pete Norton/Getty Images)
Hallam’s biggest one of those was his release by Stevenage, and after a year in Spain came a tour of south-east England’s non-League circuit, including spells at Walthamstow, Chalfont St Peter, Thamesmead, and VCD Athletic.
Towards the end of his career, Hallam would be taking charge of a grassroots game the day after playing himself, and by his mid-twenties, it had become clear that there was another calling that could take him higher up the football pyramid than if he remained a player.
Eight years working at the FA had seen him operate in the refereeing department, working closely with the likes of Dan Meeson, who is now PGMOL’s development director. A subsequent spell came at the Premier League, where he was employed as an academy support manager, but that role was halted when PGMOL made him a full-time official in the summer.
Hallam, in reality, has been among the first beneficiaries of Webb’s plans to improve officiating in the Premier League. The traditional model, where referees are typically asked to prove themselves at a certain level over one or more seasons before being considered for promotion, has been relaxed, rewarding those who PGMOL staff believe can operate further up the pyramid.
“We’ve been able to stretch officials by exposing them to higher levels of games more quickly than previously would’ve been the case,” said Webb on a PGMOL YouTube video in 2023. “We’re facilitating an expedited pathway so talent can flourish more quickly than before.”
That talent-spotting programme meant Hallam was in charge of only 48 games in the three divisions of the EFL before making his Premier League debut. Those who came before him might have been asked to take charge of two or three times that many matches before being handed the responsibilities and pressures of a top-flight fixture.
Hallam’s ethnic background has also been an additional thread in his journey. He has been a central figure in CORE X, a programme run between PGMOL and the FA designed to widen the pathway for match officials from underrepresented backgrounds aiming to reach an elite level. Launched in 2023, Launched in 2023, it has seen 29 officials who are Black, Asian or mixed heritage involved, and Hallam’s new role as a Premier League referee provides an obvious inspiration.
The late Uriah Rennie had stood alone as a Black official for so long, but after Allison and Sunny Singh Gill, who was the first British South Asian to referee a Premier League game in March 2024, he is another breaking convention.
People who know Hallam consider him to be calm, confident and a strong communicator. Guardiola can also attest that he knows his own mind.
