OFFSET YOUR WORLD CUP TRAVEL WITH GREENERTRAVEL
Date: 8th May 2026
The Case Continues
By Donald C Stewart
Every Monday morning, you can guarantee that the back pages of every national newspaper shall include some manager somewhere or some pundit in a studio suggesting that the referees have got something wrong. In many ways, it’s like yet another national sport that gets added to last minute goals that should never have been allowed by the keeper or refusing your biggest rivals tickets to come and see their team play.
More importantly, this scrutiny rightly raises the way refereeing and officialdom are viewed in this country.
To be fair, much though we do have a go at referees, most do recognise, especially many within the punditry business, when held to account, that they think the officials do a relatively decent job. Most of the time they get it right, and some of the time, due to the bizarre nature of Scottish football and the way in which they are asked to operate, they make mistakes.
It’s not all the time, it’s not very often, but when it is a mistake, there have been attempts to put their hands up in the air and say, we got it wrong.
Then there is VAR. It has not got rid of all the dodgy decisions.
But despite the debate, which is sometimes a touch heated, the one thing I have never seen, even though the febrile nature of Scottish football, is anybody of note come out and point a finger at a referee and blatantly claim that they are in the pocket of Glasgow Celtic or Rangers. There has never been, in my lifetime, anybody with a degree of sense who has suggested that level of corruption.
I know that there are terracing people now screaming at my very words, pointing out this official, or that official, or the way in which the establishment have gathered together to support each other and defend themselves against accusations and so on. But the truth of the matter is that our officials, though perhaps not squeaky clean now and again, have never been accused of corruption.
So, spare a thought for Italian football.
Having gone through the scandal that was Carciopoli way back when, Gianluca Rocci, a member of Italian Football’s Hall of Fame, and “one of the most prominent referees in our game in recent years,”, according to the Italian Football Federation, has suspended himself from being the Italian refereeing regulator.
As reported in The Athletic, this 52-year-old has been an official at a Champions League final, a European Super Cup, a Europa League final, and retired not that long ago. But now his name is being linked with making decisions that have favoured Inter Milan.
During his time as the referee designator of the National Referees Committee for Serie A, he is accused of committing fraud. Now, the reference to Calciapoli comes from 20 years ago in Serie A, when his influence in the selection of referees in Italy’s topflight came to focus. Whilst Rocci is denying he’s done anything wrong and believes that the current investigation is going to exonerate him, the very fact that two decades after Italian football was rocked by such a scandal is a scandal in itself.
There is exasperation with the standard of refereeing in Italy. There is exasperation with the standard of VAR protocol in Italy. And there’s a war within the refereeing body itself. The credibility of Italian football for many is being put on the table and carved apart by prosecutors and defenders alike.
Of course, on top of that, Italian football also has been rocked by not getting to the World Cup again. The Azzurri have always graced the World Cup when they have been there with such elegance and poise. But Italy, generally, suffers from the scent of scandal, particularly when looking at Italian politics. People imagine deals in back corridors thanks to the Italian electoral system. Therefore, when it comes to anything to do with Italy, people do tend to believe that there’s something dodgy going on.
From afar we should keep an eye on it.
Has it anything to do with Scottish football? Should we look at this and see there being any kind of suggestion that in Europe, if somebody has a cough, we end up with a cold? No.
But it’s interesting to see, as we go into the World Cup year, without Italy there, just exactly what it means to football when there are scandals.
We should all learn from the results of any investigation looking into something which has become such a hot topic across the whole of European football. I can hardly find any federation across the globe that’s not had VAR issues. Now, I for one would just like to see it binned. I don’t think it’s fit for purpose. I don’t think it does the thing that it said it was going to go and do. However, I am cognisant of the fact that it has reduced the number of errors on the pitch. However, it also has reduced the number of times we get 90 minutes scheduled and 90 minutes played. We’re now getting to the point where Ross County got relegated after a 98th minute penalty, Arsenal got denied a win in their Champions League semi-final first leg, and there are countless examples of VAR intervening in decisions being made based upon believing that the referee in the centre of the pitch does not have the right view to make the correct decision.
As Italian football starts to eat itself and work out just exactly what the right view is and what the correct decision may be, perhaps all of us should take a pause, sit back and look at just exactly what it is that this scandal is going to teach us and get out our pen and our jotter and start to learn lessons.
In The Athletic, their reporting ends with a simple sentence in three words, the case continues. It struck me that here in Scotland fans, pundits, critics, get shut down when we feel the case has not been answered.
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