HE’S determined to make it big in the field of football.

But Huddersfield student Arran Williams has given the idea of being a player the red card.

Not for him the dream of being the next Wayne Rooney or Frank Lampard.

The 20-year-old business student has his sights set on being a referee, like Huddersfield’s own Premier League whistleblower, Martin Atkinson.

Atkinson began his career on the muddy playing fields around Mirfield, but is now one of the country’s top referees.

Arran has loved playing football since he was a child, but says he realised he wasn’t going to cut it as a pro.

Determined to stay involved with the sport, he decided that coaching and refereeing were the way to go.

The wannabe referee already officiates in a number of competitions, including the West Yorkshire League, and hopes to go all the way to officiating England’s top flight, the Premier League.

He said: “I want to get on the FIFA list.

“So I signed up for a refereeing course run by the West Riding County FA and the next thing I knew I was out there doing a game!

“It was certainly a different experience.

“Having played from the ages of 10 to 19, I was running into the position I normally played, so had to get back to where I needed to be to make the decisions.”

But he soon developed a feel for refereeing, an important dimension of which is to build trust with the teams.

He says: “You should always have a smile on your face, so you can calm everything down.”

Arran has already had his first taste of working abroad when he joined the roster of referees for a summer tournament in Denmark and he is now making use of his placement year at university to boost his football credentials.

While most of the class on his business and financial services degree course have gone off to posts with firms, Arran has gone it alone, offering his services as a football coach and adding to his experience as a referee.

It’s going well – enough to earn Arran a Kirklees Council Youth Enterprise Award, which he received towards the end of last year.

He has been involved in plenty of coaching – including Huddersfield Town Ladies – and by the autumn will probably have notched-up his 100th game as a referee.

Arran will complete the final year of his degree during 2014 and aims by then to be refereeing at semi-professional level.