Busacca new head of Fifa refereeing
Massimo Busacca has been appointed as new head of Fifa’s refereeing department. The Swiss referee, who will start at August 1st, has announced the end of his career as ‘men in black’ recently.
Fifa president Joseph Blatter is happy with his recruit: “As I have said on many occasions, I have made refereeing one of my main priorities. Massimo Busacca’s experience will prove to be particularly useful to our mission and to our efforts to continue the groundwork we have put in place with the confederations and member associations in this particularly important area.”
The question for many referees is: will this in the future bring much change into refereeing. According to German newspaper Der Tagesspiel, Busacca has said he is favouring a goal-line camera, something his fellow countryman Blatter never wanted to think about as a serious option for professional football.
UPDATE: Busacca has spoken about the use of video technology to SwissInfo: “I’m against it. We’ve talked about having fifth and sixth referees. I’m convinced that this is a good solution to better address the situation.”
2 Comments
Niclas E
Concerning the update: I have evaluated this topic in June as well: http://footballrefereeing.blogspot.com/2011/06/june-evaluation-technical-aids-in.html
I think one has to weigh up the opportunities we have, the drive for using this technology and the referee as fallible personality.
To my mind, the Additional Assistant Referees offer the possibility that young and non-FIFA referees can receive first impressions of an atmosphere like in Santiago Bernabeu (e.g.). However, they showed as well that they are not able to evaluate dives in a correct way which occur about 3 metres away from them (example: Richard Liesveld in Porto-Villarreal).
If one uses technical aids, please only for goal or not-goal decisions.
Players can make mistakes, referees as well. In my opinion we actually need technical aids in goal decisions but the rest has to be evaluated by the referee and nothing else.
admin
Busacca also said that the extra assistants didn’t work out that well at first, but now they are really an improvement for refereeing.
Dutch referees are also favouring technology, but only for goal-lines.