Stéphanie Frappart from France, Salima Mukansanga from Rwanda and Yoshimi Yamashita from Japan have been nominated by the FIFA Referees Committee for the world title fights from 21 November to 18 December in Qatar.
Daniel Siebert from Berlin is one of the 36 World Cup referees for the first time. The 38-year-old whistled at last year’s European Championship and has been a FIFA referee since 2015. The assistants at the desert World Cup are Rafael Foltyn (Mainz) and Jan Seidel (Schwante), and the video assistants are Bastian Dankert (Rostock) and Marco Fritz (Korb). Felix Brych from Munich whistled at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and 2018 in Russia. Since 2019, 50 referee trios had prepared for a possible assignment.
Collina: “The perfect end to a long process”
The nomination of three referees and the three assistants Neuza Back (Brazil), Karen Díaz Medina (Mexico) and Kathryn Nesbitt (USA) is for Pierluigi Collina “the culmination of a long process that began several years ago with the use of women referees in FIFA youth and senior men’s competitions and proof that quality, not gender, counts”. This is what the former top Italian referee said. “I hope that the appointment of elite female referees for important men’s competitions will soon no longer be a sensation but a matter of course.”
Source: dpa