Just five weeks ago, Anthony Taylor was centre stage at the World Cup – refereeing the last-16 match between Spain and Portugal in Dallas.

But now, for the first time in 20 years, he is not involved as an English football season gets under way.

From the outside, the turnaround from officiating at the highest level to retirement seems sudden.

So why did Taylor quit?

Here, for the first time, the 47-year-old explains his decision in detail – opening up on the impact of the often toxic debate surrounding officiating, and the intense scrutiny faced by referees.

Taylor also says he thinks his fellow officials should think twice before criticising their former colleagues in the media and talks of his hopes of helping Turkish football emerge from a sprawling referee betting scandal.

And he reveals what he really thinks of the video assistant referee (VAR) system.

Taylor retired last month, announcing in a short statement the end of a career during which he officiated 668 matches in the English professional game, every major domestic cup final, and 163 international fixtures.

He wrote it had been “an immense privilege, but the pressure is intense and the scrutiny is constant”.

So was that why he quit?

“It was part of it,” Taylor says when we meet at his lawyer’s offices in Leeds.

“Any referee will be lying to you if they said that pressure or that scrutiny did not bother them, because that’s a natural human reaction.

“One of the challenges that referees face at every level is actually understanding the challenges that we face.

“Fear of making mistakes, external opinion, spectators, managers, parents, media, colleagues. All these things feed into creating self-doubt, lacking confidence, and then things can spiral out of control and you lose the ability to actually have any confidence in what you’re doing on the field.”

For years, Taylor said he had developed “resilience” to handle the pressures he faced, but can that only last so long?

“Everybody will experience times where dealing with that environment for a long period of time, your energy levels would dip,” he says.

“That then starts to impact on motivation and your actual confidence. It goes back to the confidence again of, ‘I’ve got to go again, make sure I don’t make a mistake, still want to get to this tournament or have this match’. It’s a very real feeling that everybody would go through.

“I was very confident in my own coping mechanisms on how I dealt with that.

“The decision to retire is purely based on my body and my mind coming to its natural course in that current role – and it’s ready to go on a new journey.”

Having taken charge of three matches in his second World Cup, Taylor says he only decided to retire once his tournament ended, which seemed like “the perfect time”.

He says he has not missed gruelling pre-season training drills, but admits to “a hint of sadness” because “that’s a big part of my life that I’m going to miss being involved in”.

“I wanted to decide when I finished on my own terms,” he says. “And I don’t think you can say there’s any better place to finish than at the World Cup.”

So are his family relieved? Last year, Taylor told BBC Sport they no longer went to his matches because of the abuse he received, and spoke about how they were targeted by Roma fans in Budapest Airport after the 2023 Europa League final.

“Undoubtedly one of the things that you are considering are the serious sacrifices that both your family and your friends have made over the years for you to do what you do,” he says.

“Family life takes a back seat… so, for sure, that was a big part of why I decided to step back.

“It was in combination with… the scrutiny and the demands placed on referees at the very top level. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re struggling to cope with those demands, but it comes to a point where it feels that your body and your mind needs to take a break from those kind of pressures.”

Taylor has stayed off social media in recent years, but admits there is a limit to avoiding the scrutiny.

“Even away from social media, the general coverage of football these days is 24/7,” he says. “So there’s a lot more mediums for you to discover what people think about what happened last weekend.

“It’s not always negative feedback when you come across fans and people when you’re travelling around the country. But it is like you are living in a goldfish bowl for 10 months of the year.”

Taylor says the scrutiny on officials is “off the scale”, and much of that is from “people in the media looking for things to scrutinise, whether that be fairly or unfairly”. He describes it as a “big snowball effect”.

Does it disappoint him that includes former match officials?

“Yes, it does personally, because it doesn’t have any balance to it a lot of the time,” he says.

“It’s just part of the focus that comes with football. When we’re dealing with supposedly objective analysis of matches, whether that be an expert ex-player in a studio or an ex-referee, that should be balanced and fair.

“If it’s all one-sided criticism, that creates a culture of fear, disrespect, shame.

“There’s a thirst for people to be told: ‘Is the decision right or wrong?’ And the reality in football is there’s a lot of subjectivity and opinion in the middle of right and wrong. But that’s not acceptable a lot of the time now.”

Asked if that means he will not go into the media, he adds: “I would never feel like I would be wanting to be in a place where I want to criticise somebody, because I’d like to think I’ve got a very good understanding of why somebody’s made a decision that they’ve made.

“Of course, a wrong decision can be made. Nobody really chooses to understand the reasoning why.

“I feel my skills and my passion are better suited to trying to pass on that knowledge and experience I’ve been lucky enough to accumulate over the years.”

Taylor will be trying to do exactly that in Turkey, where he has been appointed director of elite refereeing for the country’s football federation.

He will take up that role in the wake of a major refereeing scandal in the country, with a five-year investigation finding 371 of 571 match officials had betting accounts.

Asked how he can help the federation move on, Taylor says: “The main focus, working together with the president and chairman, is on helping the officials – particularly the younger officials in the group – develop, build that resilience, build a better skillset to cope with those demanding matches, and really to drive improvement of standards in that respect and that’s the central aim of my role there.

“The role, in a nutshell, is about improving standards for the top-level group of officials in Turkey, along with helping them develop their talent ID programme and also helping their international referees improve, get better, more high-profile appointments. Which is something that excites me.

“I’m very privileged that people hold my experience and knowledge in such high regard that they think I can make such a positive impact.

While Taylor says his biggest regret is never having the chance to take charge of a Champions League final, he relished officiating at his second World Cup, though he found officiating in the extreme heat of Dallas “brutal”.

Once again, VAR proved controversial at the tournament, with four new areas covered by the system.

“Anything to do with VAR is good when we’re talking about increasing the overall accuracy of decision-making,” says Taylor.

“But we also need to remember that VAR is there to create a sense of justice, so [for] the big clear errors, and it’s not there for microscopic, long-detail checks. And that’s probably where everybody’s trying to work even harder to get to, particularly this coming season.

“I think if we continue to focus on not being microscopic and not being too long in checking situations, where we’re only using really clear evidence of an error being made, then… yeah, I think people will start to accept and trust the process more.”

Asked if it was being used too often, Taylor says: “I think most people agree that does happen on occasions, so it’s very sensible for us to say that and acknowledge that sometimes things are taking too long, and we’re being too microscopic.

“We don’t need to take too long looking at stuff, and we need to act on really clear visual evidence to intervene and change the decision.”