Everyone against the referees, often without even knowing the rules. It’s the paradox of the most contentious and polemical championship in recent years with Rocchi in its sights and a movement that is too weak
Houston, we have a problem. And it’s not just the referees who make mistakes – in the autumn they did so with sometimes excessive frequency – but the level of toxicity of the debate that accompanies them. At all levels. And which feeds on a mixture of the desire to blow the whistle regardless, the need to cover up one’s failures, to feed the enemy the easiest to hit and, this is not a detail, ignorance of the rules. Even from those who should know him without gray areas because they are experts in the field.
Brief summary of the first day of the new year, which began exactly as the previous one had ended. There is a goalkeeper who claims that by regulation anyone who touches him inside the penalty area commits a foul, a circumstance denied by the rules written years ago (Svilar, Rome), a coach outraged by a goal disallowed due to an active offside position at the start of the play, unaware that this is foreseen from 2022 by the Ifab regulations, the body that governs the rules of football for everyone in the world, and which has brought his indignation into the public debate (Palladino, Atalanta).
Referees and controversies, Gasperini’s short memory
And there is another coach (Gasperini, Rome) who cried foul, calling it “unheard of absurdity” and other similar things, the concession of a goal by the opponent who was on a collision course with his goalkeeper with a dynamic that can be discussed but which is certainly much less borderline than a goal scored a few months earlier by one of his players (De Ketelaere against Milan) then branded as “extraordinary” because the attacker had climbed into the sky, mocking his colleague on the other side of the barricade (Fonseca, Milan) who protested about the push on his defender: “If the attempt is to talk about something else and not the match, and to bring tension, it’s not working.”
All against one, in short. Everyone against the referees. Who have their faults but who are now brought up even for free without anyone being there to defend them. 2025 ended with the dossier of the alleged wrongs suffered by Lazio complete with PEC and requests for institutional discussions and written clarifications. The fault? A series of episodes largely decided correctly by the referee and VAR such as the failure to award the penalty in the frantic final at San Siro against Milan (that certainly would have been a scandal), the confirmation of the equalizer for Udinese after a non-punishable touch of the attacker’s arm, the expulsions of Parma which could have been three and not just two and so on.
The weakness of the AIA and the referees with no one to defend them
A toxic, unbreathable climate. What it is the son of is quite clear: the AIA is experiencing one of the moments of greatest political weakness in its history and it is a vessel that everyone thinks they can board and attack at will. There are those who do it within a broader battle of sports politics and those who do it for convenience. In the middle there is a group of referees who are on average young and whose average level, especially in the VAR room, is not yet sufficient. The problem is that it is a situation that has been known for some time and on which the designer Rocchi is working, trying to speed up the process.
He is in the fifth year of his mandate, it could be the last or not, it also depends on the tensions and investigations affecting the association. In any case, his care has produced a group of emerging players who are now ready for the big matches to join the latest “great old men”. In a normal country it should be recognized, as should the effort at transparency that leads the head of the referees to declare his team’s mistakes every week and to underline when things are done well.
In theory, others, including professionals and communications workers, should trust what he says and makes people listen. In reality everyone goes their own way and Rocchi goes from reliable when he says he’s right to inadequate when he says he’s wrong. And we start again from the beginning, throwing into the debate arguments often without any regulatory basis passed off as truth. The elders explain that it has always been like this, since the dawn of time, but this does not mean that one must resign. The referees make mistakes, the VAR has raised the level of expectations and controversies and yet a review of the rules wouldn’t be bad before appearing in public to judge their work.
