European Super League: who will be the match referees?

By now, European football is at war. Twelve of the most powerful clubs have turned their backs on UEFA and launched their own competition, despite the fact that the entity that governs football in the Old Continent ordered to desist from this idea and announced that the players who participate in this competition will be banned from the rest of the tournaments, both at the level of their teams and those selected.

In this context of chaos, doubts and threats, an unexpected question arises. Who will be the referees of the Super League of Clubs? Is that football needs players and judges, the absence of one of them makes it impossible to play a match. The big drawback is that those responsible for administering justice depend directly on the federations of each country and therefore on FIFA, which is why it can be presumed that they will be prohibited from refereeing in this competition.

Against this background, the main European media are wondering how the Super League will solve this problem. One of the options would be to tempt several referees to abandon the federations and only whistle in the duels of this tournament. That's, they side with these 12 clubs in the war against UEFA.

For this, the main lever would be money. Taking into account that the new tournament will have a considerable increase in prizes compared to the Champions League, the founding clubs could allocate a part of those millions to the referees so that they too receive a salary increase and choose this cup over any other competition .

The other alternative would be to create its own team of referees, although this sounds more complex, since this takes time and the tournament will start in August of this year, according to the statement issued by the founding teams this Sunday.

In turn, the other question is whether or not there will be VAR, which according to its own regulations can act “when the organizer of the meeting or competition meets all the requirements of the VAR Protocol and the implementation requirements (described in the Protocol of the VAR), and has received written permission from the IFAB and FIFA ”. That's why video refereeing would not land in this contest or at least the system that is used in current football, since the other option is to use another type of technology that isn't the one that has been implemented at the FIFA level.

Aleksander Ceferin, president of UEFA, spoke on Monday and reaffirmed that players who are part of the European Super League clubs "will be banned" from international competitions and "will not be able to represent their national teams in any match": "The UEFA and the world of football are united against the shameful selfish proposal that we have seen in the last 24 hours from a select few clubs in Europe that feed on pure greed above all else".

The Super League intends to launch a 20-team competition with 15 founding members, but only 12 have currently entered: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham from England, Atlético Madrid, Barcelona and Real Madrid from Spain and Milan, Juventus and Inter of Italy.