Week of Reds Raises More Questions About Italian Referees

For a referee, the best thing to be is anonymous.  If one can get through a game without having his name mentioned, it's a very good day.

Unfortunately for Italian officials, their names have been in the press a lot lately.

Questions about the quality of the officiating on the peninsula have been brewing ever since October's controversial contest between Juventus and Roma.  The game saw three questionable penalties and a debatable offside decision, prompting questions about both the quality and integrity of the referees who served the game.

The questions came again this week.  In the two rounds of games over the period that started on Tuesday and ended Sunday—which covers 18 matches and excludes Monday's game between Cagliari and Parma and Wednesday's between Torino and Empoli—nine red cards were handed out.  In three cases this week, teams had to finish games out with only nine men on the field.

A third of the expulsions came on straight reds.  Two of them—one a straight red to Hellas Verona's Rafael Marquez on Sunday and the other two quick yellows in succession to Udinese's Emmanuel Badu on Tuesday—were for dissent.

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Italy has a history of high-level officiating.  Three Italians have had the honor of refereeing a World Cup final, including two of the last four.  Three have been in the middle for the European Championship final.  Since the Champions League took its current form, three Italians have taken charge of its showpiece match.

Currently, 10 Italian referees qualify as FIFA officials and three of them are on UEFA's elite list.  Unfortunately, it's been easy to forget that lately.

Nicola Rizzoli, who drew praise for controlling both the World Cup final this summer and the Champions League final in 2013, is easily the best man the Italians can assign.  He has been charged with big matches on all levels and has easily proven himself worthy of the legacy of men like Roberto Rosetti or the incomparable Pierluigi Collina.

Beyond him there are solid officials, but none who are electrifying, and some who give fans and players pause when they see their name attached to their match.

The obvious name there is Gianluca Rocchi.  How an official so incredibly deficient as he is has managed to get onto the UEFA elite list and then stay there is beyond comprehension.  

The list of controversial decisions he's made is so long that after he horrifically botched the Juve/Roma game in October, Goal put together a list of his most controversial moments, calling the 10 games listed "just a small selection" of his head-scratchers.

The rest of the league has slowly been trending more towards Rocchi than Rizzoli.  The card statistics play that out.

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Italian referees are more trigger happy than in seasons past.  If you add up all of the red cards in the disciplinary statistics section of WhoScored.com, the number comes out to 105.  That's only two fewer than last season with four rounds still to play.

Italy's refs are developing hair triggers.  Dismissals for dissent like that of Marquez and Badu shouldn't happen, and they've been happening continually this year.  Apart from Badu's quick double yellow, his teammate Maurizio Domizzi, who was also sent off Tuesday, was given the first of his two bookings for disagreeing with the official.  Unless something truly nasty is said, an official should have thicker skin.

A few of the reds from this week also looked to be simply bad calls.  Angelo Cervellera's dismissal of Jacopo Sala earlier on in the Verona game was extremely harsh—the tackle was deserving of a yellow, but not red.

Paolo Mazzoleni was, in this writer's opinion, incorrect in sending Milan's Mattia De Sciglio to the showers 55 seconds into the Rossoneri's tilt with Napoli for denying a goalscoring opportunity.  Center back Gabriel Paletta was moving into Marek Hamsik's path to cover and at least had a chance at making an effort to stop the midfielder from scoring.

The officiating this year has finally started rubbing coaches the wrong way.  Verona manager Andrea Mandorlini told reporters after Saturdays game, via Football Italia, that officials are "testing our patience."

He isn't the only one to complain about officials this season.  Apart from the uproar at Roma over the Juve match, Napoli claimed in a March Twitter post (h/t Daily Mirror) that referees had "falsified the league" after Atalanta equalized their match with the Partenopei on a goal that the club thought should have been disallowed for a foul.

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Referees are, of course, human.  They make mistakes.  It is especially difficult to officiate a top-level soccer game given the speed at which the game is played.  But watching them this season has been a little worrying.

This is an especially sensitive issue for Serie A.  After the Calciopoli scandal, they have always needed to go an extra few feet toward making certain that the referees are on the level.  It's unlikely that there are shenanigans going on in the refereeing ranks, but there is a line between making mistakes and lacking quality—and it's one the cumulative performance of this year's officials are inching toward.

The league needs to take a step back this year to figure out why so many players have taken early showers and what they might be able to do to improve the stable of Serie A officials.