Who did FIFA choose?

Nearing sixty days before the tournament is to kickoff, the FIFA Referees Committee finished their deliberations and selected a team of 170 match officials for the biggest ever World Cup. One should offer the necessary and much-deserved congratulations to them all, and commiserations to all those who missed out - for some of them, some very painful days are ahead, and we wish them well in their recovery. 

Some thoughts on FIFA's choices follow.

Dramatic events in the Spanish race

For the last World Cup to take place in Mexico, FIFA nominated a total of forty-two referees (six of which were reserves) and for the last World Cup to take place in the United States, after a key preselection seminar in which thirty referees and twenty-five linesmen took part, nine of those officials were cut when the final list was determined and announced. The task facing the FIFA managers is not small as they ready for a tournament with double the number of matches and over double the number of roles to assign compared with both 1986 and 1994. Whatever one thinks of what they have done (and in my mind it is mostly comprehensible), the difficulty of the task that faced Pierluigi Collina and Massimo Busacca is clearly rather unenviable.

Corridor games inside FIFA are clearly nothing new, but the story that surrounds Alejandro Hernandez Hernandez is surely quite an extraordinary one - after a preselection process that lasted over three years, the situation for the referee from the Canary Islands apparently changed in just three hours. Besides the quite egregious violation of the 'performances principle' that Hernandez's inclusion represents, this affair was not even handled well in terms of human resources management by UEFA. Apparently, they managed to forget they are dealing not only with athletes and actors on the field of play, but also human beings with their own goals, expectations and intuitions.

How was Jose Maria Sanchez Martinez supposed to react upon seeing the inclusion of Hernandez Hernandez in the preselection process? It was a verdict on his level of refereeing which was probably more damning than being ultimately excluded as he was. The news that Hernandez would join him in Viareggio at the preselection meeting must have been a very devastating blow for Sanchez Martinez. I can't imagine that the relevant people didn't realise this rather obvious fact. How then could the UEFA referees committee expect Sanchez to perform when a very short while later, he was assigned a very big match in the Champions League, notwithstanding the fact that his performance was to be assessed by Roberto Rosetti? It is hard to read exactly the intentions of Sanchez Martinez's designation to PSG-Liverpool. Was it a show of support for being dropped for the World Cup, which at least would be admirable in intention, or perhaps the UEFA referees committee (no doubt led in this matter by their Spanish member, Carlos Velasco Carballo) trying to hedge their bets somewhat.

The committee would have doubtlessly been aware that Hernandez's late inclusion had gone down very badly with the other confederations. Maybe they foresaw that this match could serve as an extremely late attempt to save Sanchez's standing in World Cup race? In any case, the delay of FIFA's selection being formally announced until the day after PSG-Liverpool did set up an extraordinarily dramatic match on the refereeing front. It is surely too much to say that this one fixture was decisive for Sanchez. Though, I would be fairly confident on guessing what both Busacca and Collina were doing between the hours of 9pm and 11pm CET on Wednesday evening. Sanchez had lost the trust of the important people in refereeing, and in Paris he refereed like it. The Spanish official looked very hamstrung by the 'FIFA philosophy' teachings and his performance was not impressive; my grade would be 7,8(2) for him. 

At the point of including Hernandez in the preselection, if a Spanish referee was to referee PSG-Liverpool, it should have been him (I know he did PSG's home game in the previous round). To even have set up a 'last-chance saloon World Cup' match in the manner that they did for Sanchez Martinez is, in my opinion, not the way to ensure optimal performance and certainly not how managing referees should work. The FIFA test events should serve this purpose, not an already pressurised Champions League quarterfinal, in the week on which the selections are finalised. That they had already told Sanchez, in not as many words, 'we are doubting you' with Hernandez's hurried inclusion, makes it even worse. Something went extremely wrong on a management level in this whole affair, and the UEFA referees committee should reflect on how to avoid it happening again - though, one should stress that the specific delay in the selection is clearly not their fault.

Sanchez Martinez will not be among the World Cup referees

What must be most painful for Jose Maria Sanchez Martinez is the reality that, despite starting the season in an extremely strong position by being given Bayern-Chelsea by UEFA, in the end he didn't really deserve to be selected for the World Cup anyway. I would have chosen him as a reserve. It must be even more difficult for the referee from Murcia because this essentially is a repetition of an episode that had happened before - he was seemingly Velasco's favoured candidate to ref for Spain at Euro 2024. But, in poorly refereeing the matches Georgia-Luxembourg and W.Ham-Leverkusen, his consideration fell away among the other committee members and the position defaulted to Jesus Gil Manzano. These must be extremely difficult days for Sanchez Martinez personally, and clearly we wish him well in his recovery.

It seems after what must have constituted hours of abject panic on Thursday afternoon, it appears that Velasco and RFEF have managed to avoid the next World Cup being the first since 1938 that there is no Spanish (main) referee - but only just. One shouldn't drift into needless polemics, but were someone to describe the selection of Hernandez as 'a joke', it would be hard to offer meaningful disagreement. The big problem from my perspective is not so much Hernandez's curriculum vitae in international refereeing, though that is clearly quite limited, but the overall level of his refereeing. It isn't fair to drag one official through the mud in a post like this and take apart what is going wrong in his games. But, I would say that unlike the only possible comparable story in the last twenty years of FIFA refereeing, Eric Poulat to Germany 2006, Hernandez is certainly struggling to offer many positive points for his selection. As a very final comment on this affair, if you see the number of cards that the Canarian referee has awarded in all of his Champions League games this season, one can imagine that was hardly an argument against him in the eyes of Busacca. I will be very interested to judge the level that Hernandez can offer this summer and, it goes without saying, that I wish him well in the World Cup.

The Spanish saga aside, the selection in our confederation was essentially the perfect one: all twelve playoff referees plus the injured Marciniak. To reiterate what I said previously - these thirteen referees belong to the best of the best in world refereeing, and they will individually savour a great deal of personal trust for their level of refereeing by FIFA. There was also a rumour that Peljto was even quite close to being chosen as a reserve, but in the end this didn't happen (one could imagine looking at the numbers that he lost a run-off with Omar Al-Ali for this). As a final comment on Europe: much is said about Roberto Rosetti on the Law5 blog, but it should be added - the Italian manager of European referees can be deeply proud about the level of officials that UEFA will send to the World Cup this summer. In all of this, (including the questions about Hernandez) some perspective of that fact should not be lost.

A rapid rise for Joao Pinheiro, selected by FIFA

I wrote to head the preview pieces that "I think that Busacca and Collina will resist the temptation to repeat what CONMEBOL did at the last Copa America (and what FIFA used to do until the mid-80s) and take a random, political number of referees to keep everyone happy and then have no clear target for how to use all of the officials whom they have chosen". Insofar as their role as FIFA managers is to satiate the person writing this text (which is quite rightly 0%!), then Busacca and Collina contravened that 'nightmare' scenario spoken of above. In a tournament with seventy-two group matches, they have ultimately selected thirty-six main referees (72/2 = 36), and on Thursday morning, they had selected sixteen reserve referees in a tournament which will be played in sixteen different venues (and they finished on fifteen, when the referees' base is in the same city as one of the venues).

It is a very good thing both in principle and in practice that FIFA have adjusted the slots as they saw fit. While on the surface it might seem counter-intuitive that the number of Asian main referees from 2022 has remained static and the number of Africans up only one, the proportional increase in the number of Asian and African teams in 2026 does make sense of what Busacca and Collina have determined.  I would imagine there was an 'unofficial' number six for CAF (Omar Artan), five/six for AFC (Khaled Al-Turais and Ma Ning) and clearly only one referee in OFC (Campbell-Kirk Kawana-Waugh). If you were to ask, 'truthfully, are these four officials' qualities going to really be missed as main referees at the World Cup?', the answer would be negative. 

I would say though: one hopes that FIFA succeeded in stressing the fluidity of the allocations for each confederation. Two referees whom I tipped in being '100-percenters' were ultimately not even selected as main referees in the tournament. If those two officials themselves saw it as a given that they would referee games in the World Cup, then the list announced this week must have come as a crushing blow to them. Expectation management, one hopes, was evident here.

Khaled Al-Turais during the last Asian Cup

What then of the remaining twenty-two choices themselves? Well, there are some omitted referees who can declare themselves unlucky, such as the two officials whom one can read were informally rejected at the Arab Cup in Ahmed Al-Kaf of Oman and Mario Escobar of Guatemala (Escobar was very good in the Emirati title decider yesterday, by the way). It is a pity that the person who is actually the second best referee in Asia has been left at home, while Faghani, Tantashev and a Qatari (it fell to Al-Jassim) were always safe. However, Al-Kaf was not able to feature at the Under-20 World Cup due to injury, and was relatively poor in the Arab Cup, so his exclusion is actually a logical one.

The capping of Asia at four referees ensured that it had to be an 'all-star' list from that confederation. This made choosing Salman Fallahi, who would have been a more meritorious vote than his more-experienced colleague Abdulrahman Al-Jassim, a de facto impossibility. His unacceptable Arab Cup performance in Algeria-Iraq proved then to be anything but insurmountable for Al-Jassim, who was confirmed for a second consecutive World Cup. In him, Tantashev and Faghani, there are three AFC referees who all present significant weaknesses in different facets of their refereeing. One can wonder how FIFA will solve that in the World Cup itself. Adham Makhadmeh's rise to be the fourth and final Asian referee is a very impressive one. From my perspective, it is fully deserved.

An apt descriptor for some referees is 'unlucky', but there is one referee who can describe his very likely relegation to being a reservist in a little stronger terms: Juan Gabriel Calderon from Costa Rica. An extraordinary coalescence of factors has cost Calderon, which might lead him to question whether he had unbeknowingly shattered any mirrors in recent times: the automatic place for Canada as they will host thirteen of the one hundred and four matches in the tournament, the automatic place for political correctness having to coincidentally come from his own confederation, and then after all that, having rather dubiously lost a probable run-off with Said Martinez, despite having in my opinion eclipsed the level of refereeing shown by the Honduran (whose selection I would not begrudge either). Tough decisions have to be made when the refereeing lists of big tournaments are drawn up, but I don't anyone has been more unfortunate than Calderon in the race to 2026.

The choices in Africa are very good. The five World Cup-level referees have all been chosen as main referees. If one considers that the race in sub-Saharan Africa as somewhat a separate one to the Maghreb countries (+ Mauritania), then the choice of Pierre Ghislain Atcho over Artan might be surprising for most, but for me it is the right one. For both Brazil and Argentina, particularly the latter, the right referee 'won' the respective battle for second. In general the right choices were made in the Americas, if one accepts that there is a behind-the-scenes agreement that Benitez's choosing as a main referee was mandatory.

Overall, if there are two (maybe up to four, with Al-Jassim/Penso, but that isn't a question of technical assessments) genuinely egregious cases out of a squad of thirty-six referees chosen, then one can and indeed should say that Busacca and Collina have done a mostly good job in the selection aspect.

A famous fourth official carries out his duties in 2002

Historically speaking, the most remarkable aspect of the final selections for this World Cup have been the number of reserve officials apparently selected. There is logic in the specific number (well, near specific) chosen by FIFA, but it does not seem unfair to remark that a 'the more, the merrier' approach has been taken. This route has offered FIFA a way out of some politically delicate situations, such as that of Andres Rojas. The most remarkable reserve selection is that of Raphael Claus. A main referee at the last World Cup, FIFA have somewhat humiliated Claus out of political necessity - in wanting to choose Dario Herrera in the role for Argentina, they have no 'choice' but to nominate a third Brazilian too. The exclusion of Edina Alves Batista from the preselection process probably seemed unfortunate at a certain moment for FIFA. In any case, it is the dream of all referees in the world to participate at the World Cup, so the extent of any 'humiliation' should be tempered by that. 

The number of reserves being correlated to the number of venues should make sense. Mostly, it is an exercise in 'intellectual time-saving' for the people who will make the referee appointments at the World Cup. In the past, it was different: at World Cup 1998, everything was nicely planned so that in the first thirty-four designated games of the tournament, each official would referee one game and also reserve one. At that time, the referees committee only had four positions to determine for each match. Nowadays, there is a whole new meaning to 'the third team', as an inordinate number of roles must be determined by FIFA for every single fixture. It makes the life of the designators much easier if they are not spending much time in working out who should be each match's reserve referee during the tournament. The reserve officials will not be housed in hotels close to their designated venues, but rather probably making the same flight to-and-from Miami a number of times. One hopes that the reserve referees are coached to be more preventative than in the last World Cup, and the 'benches madness' that occurred during Qatar can be somewhat tempered.

The next fifty days or so will comprise the refereeing politicians at FIFA, headed by Pierluigi Collina and Massimo Busacca, planning out the group stage appointments and setting in place a tentative plan for how all of the designations will play out. There are for refereeing enthusiasts some things to fear about how the twenty-third FIFA World Cup will look, but I hope there is much to be excited about too. We should wish the one hundred and seventy selected match officials good luck, and now wait with great excitement for the tournament to begin!