by Martin Rødvand on May 19, 2011
I will now try something I have not done before on this blog. As we know, some of the referees for the Gold Cup has been announced by their national football associations, but we have not seen the complete list.
This post will mainly work as a discussion thread, where I will update the post with new referees as they become announced. If you do not wish to post in the comments, you can email me at martin@law5-thereferee.net.
The 2011 Gold Cup will be played in the United States June 5 – June 25, and the winner is qualified for the Confederations Cup in Brazil in 2013.
The referees we know of are (taken from the comments in Referees for U-20 World Cup post):
Referee, assistant, assistant, country
Walter Lopéz, Hernenerito Leal, Gerson López, Guatemala
David Gantar, Hector Vergara, Joe Fletcher, Canada
Jair Marrufo, USA
Baldomero Toledo, USA
Do you know of any referees going to the Gold Cup? Let us know in the comments!
by Martin Rødvand on June 1, 2009
After the IFAB in February approved the use of additional assistants it’s now being reported that the first professional league to benefit from this experiment will be the Europa League (previously the UEFA Cup).
Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, confirmed this under a two-day meeting of FIFA’s executive committee in Nassau.
This means that from this July when the qualifying for the Europa League starts, each match will have a referee, two assistant referees, two goal line referees and a fourth official. The scheme is an extension from the test run in qualifying matches for the UEFA European U-19 Championship last October/November where the system was praised and named a success.
Michel Platini, the UEFA boss, has been credited with the invention of this system as he’s reportedly very opposed to the use of video technology. It was previously reported that both the Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1 were interested in testing this system.
However, this raises some questions. Will the fifth and sixth official be FIFA officials? Will they be assistant referees? Will they be from the same country as the referee and his two touchline assistants? Do they have the same authority as the referee, or will they just report and let the referee decide?
I’ll return when more information about this surfaces. Neither UEFA or FIFA has made any announcements on their own websites.
Update: Suddenly, a carefully crafted article, not really revealing anything of interest appeared on UEFA.com. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the qualifiers to get the feel for this system.
[Thanks Richard]
