Referees

This is, without a doubt, the strangest sending off we’ve ever seen. FC Porto came up against Moreirense in a must-win match in the Portuguese Taca da Liga cup competition on Tuesday night. With Moreirense leading 1-0 in the 79th minute, the referee inexplicably ended any hope Porto had of advancing to the semifinals by giving Danilo Pereira his second yellow card of the match and sending him off. 

His offense? Being ran into by the referee. It’s a shockingly ridiculous decision that calls into question the integrity of everything. This guy is tripping off the power. 

Being a professional referee in the Premier League is an extremely tough job. The old adage “Who would ever want to be a referee?” rings particularly true in the EPL. They get more abuse than we as fans care to admit, and every single one of us has been guilty of being on the wrong side of a decision before viewing the instant replay.

A surreal occurrence in the Rwandan Premier League has led to a ban of all witchcraft by the country’s football association. While the following was one of a number of incidents which preceded the ban, none are more bizarre than what happened in a Rwandan Premier League match between Mukura Victory and Rayon Sports.

With Rayon Sports losing 1-0, one of their players, Moussa Camara, was captured on film appearing to place a small object against his opponent's goalpost. 

News of Carlos Tevez perhaps becoming the highest paid footballer on the planet by earning nearly $40 million with Shanghai Shenhua ($1.25 per second) was unfathomable. That kind of total, when dissected and attempted to be understood, is like standing on the beach and trying to fathom all the individual grains of sand or staring up at the night sky and quantifying your place in the universe. 

Video replay made its first appearance in the world of football at the FIFA Club World Cup in Japan. We all appreciate FIFA for at least willing to experiment the replay system and see how it would work, but it’s fair to say that escalated quickly.

Jamie Vardy’s dismissal on Saturday for his lunge on Mame Biram Diouf was predicated on everything but the tackle itself. Having lost the ball to Glen Johnson in the buildup, that particular spirit that invokes images of Skittles Vodka and murmurs of “Chat Shit Get Banged” could be felt through televisions around the globe: Vardy, looking like Pokemon’s Rattata with Red Bull coursing through his mouse veins, was probably about to do something he’d regret.

Football has long been obstinate in its opposition to video technology, going so far as to appoint fifth and sixth officials to stand behind the goals doing absolutely nothing as opposed to implementing any kind of instant replay system. 

Goal-line technology has, in recent times, been successfully used at the highest levels of the game, but this only came about because of legitimate instances of robbery at the pinnacle of the sport.

Saturday’s match between Bundesliga leaders RB Leipzig and relegation-threatened FC Ingolstadt was remarkable in that the team at the bottom pulled off a highly improbable 1-0 upset. 

What was exceedingly exceptional was what transpired in second half stoppage time. Referee Markus Schmidt, who’d apparently just put down Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince before running out to officiate this match, showed that it is indeed safer to be feared than loved.