WORLD football governing body FIFA has appointed 36 referees for the Qatar 2022 World Cup scheduled for November and December, with Africans and women among them.
There will also be 69 assistant referees and 24 video match officials, who will be in charge of the Video Assistant Referees (VAR) at the global tournament, FIFA announced today.
Six of the centre referees are from Africa, however none of them is Nigerian.
The African referees set for the global tournament include Rwanda’s Salima Mukansanga, who will become one of the first three women to ever officiate at the men’s World Cup.
Mukansanga already made history in January in Cameroon when she became the first-ever female centre referee at the men’s Africa Cup of Nations.
FIFA said the match officials were selected ‘in close cooperation with the six confederations, based on their quality and the performances delivered at FIFA tournaments as well as at other international and domestic competitions in recent years’.
“As always, the criteria we have used is ‘quality first’ and the selected match officials represent the highest level of refereeing worldwide,” said the chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee, Pierluigi Collina.
“The 2018 World Cup was very successful, partly because of the high standard of refereeing, and we will do our best to be even better in a few months in Qatar.”
The other African referees are Bakary Gassama (Gambia), Mustapha Ghorbal (Algeria), Victor Gomes (South Africa), Maguette Ndiaye (Senegal) and Janny Sikazwe (Zambia), all men.
There are 10 Africans among the 69 assistant referees, from Algeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Senegal, Angola, Lesotho and Mozambique.
Massimo Busacca, FIFA’s Director of Refereeing, assured that the match officials will receive all the necessary support from FIFA.
“Thanks to an innovative tracking and support programme, all the match officials can be supervised by FIFA referees’ instructors even more closely and intensively than in previous years. This is a very important factor, from which we expect considerable improvements and progress in view of the FIFA World Cup 2022,” explained Busacca.
“In addition to that, there will be tailor-made individual programmes, in particular concerning health and fitness. Each match official will be carefully monitored in the next months with a final assessment on technical, physical and medical aspects to be made shortly before the World Cup, in order to have them in the best conditions when the ball starts rolling in Qatar.”
Collina, who was one of best referees in his active days, said the FIFA referees committee was pleased to have, for the first time in the history of the men’s World Cup, three women’s referees and three women’s assistant referees.
“We are very happy that with Stéphanie Frappart from France, Salima Mukansanga from Rwanda and Yoshimi Yamashita from Japan, as well as assistant referees Neuza Back from Brazil, Karen Díaz Medina from Mexico and Kathryn Nesbitt from the USA, we have been able to call up female match officials for the first time in the history of a FIFA World Cup,” the Italian said.
“This concludes a long process that began several years ago with the deployment of female referees at FIFA men’s junior and senior tournaments. In this way, we clearly emphasise that it is quality that counts for us and not gender.
“I would hope that in the future, the selection of elite women’s match officials for important men’s competitions will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational. They deserve to be at the FIFA World Cup because they constantly perform at a really high level, and that’s the important factor for us.”
