Ready, go and we are already discussing whistles and VAR. The designer in the crosshairs defends his men but the climate has quickly returned to the poisons of the past. And the statistics do not help the new course.
The truce lasted the space of a day. The climate around the referees has quickly become unbreathable again, controversies and poisons with the new designator in the sights Daniele Orsato and the English meter that he imposed on his whistles. Galeotta was the push that paved the way for De Bruyne’s match goal in the match won by Napoli in Genoa: foul for everyone, not for Di Bello on the pitch and for his colleague Meraviglia at VAR.
The referees made it clear that they were happy with the interpretation given on the pitch and in Lissone. Orsato was in the Marassi stands and told those present straight away, without changing his mind afterwards. The line of his new course is this: very high foul threshold, model to follow the English Premier League, VAR active only for clear and obvious errors, bringing the hand of time back to the original spirit of technology in assistance to referees. This is the thesis also supported by the head of the UEFA whistle blowers, Roberto Rosettiand it goes against the trend with the line of FIFA and Ifab who widened the field of intervention of the VAR on the occasion of the last World Cup and expect steps forward, not backwards.
The Genoa dossier and the penalty Milan is missing
In any case, the truce ended quickly and the virulence of Genoa’s protests made it immediately clear in which minefield Orsato will move in the coming months. The Genoa managers didn’t just attack the on-field decision (De Rossi: “One of the worst things that ever happened to me”), but immediately went for the big target by unleashing the memory of Di Bello’s precedents, suggesting that he was an unwelcome referee. Boom.
Not everything went smoothly in Turin either, Milan missing a more obvious penalty due to Vlasic’s very wide arm hitting the ball: has the interpretative line also changed on handballs? Good for Orsato that the Rossoneri then won, weakening much of the controversy that would have been heated in the event of a different result against the Granata.
The big matches in September, how many risks for the referees
From the looks of it, there is an immediate month of September for the refereeing team. There are many dates with a red circle and they hide great matches and enormous pitfalls. On 5 September there are Inter-Napoli, a potential championship challenge, and Roma-Atalanta. The day after Juventus-Milan. Before the long national break, Roma-Inter and Juventus-Atalanta will also be played. Test beds for Orsato’s new course which in words has been approved by everyone, in reality it is already under discussion after the first episodes.
The reality is that the new designator, like those before it, will be the scapegoat for the failures of clubs, managers and coaches whatever the refereeing standard chosen. Speaking of models, in the absence of official data on the last season that Aia has decided not to produce (ah, the era of transparency seems to have already been put aside), it is worth remembering that perception, narrative and numbers do not always travel in the same direction.
In March, UEFA had raised the alarm for an exaggerated use of VAR only to discover that the Champions League itself was aligned with the rest of Europe that counts, with the exception of the English Premier League. The numbers? In England an average of 0.275 VAR interventions per match compared to 0.38 in the Bundesliga and La Liga, 0.44 in Serie A and 0.47 in Ligue 1 to add to the 0.45 in the Champions League. And for Serie A it was the record in Rocchi’s five-year period whose intervention averages were 0.31 (2022), 0.39 (2023), 0.40 (2024) and 0.35 (2025). Moral: all over the world referees are the same as here, Orsato wants us to become English. A fascinating but also terribly risky challenge.
