Three-Man Crews for World Cup
Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the FIFA president who is on a swing through several Central and North American countries, said in El Salvador that the 2006 World Cup will be officiated by three-man teams that will remain together throughout the tournament.
“We will have very consistent refereeing for the 2006 World Cup,” soccer’s highest-ranked official said in San Salvador. “We are going to designate trios of match officials to always work together ... like a football team. We won’t be able to change them.”
In the past, referees and their assistants have been interchanged from game to game, leading to inconsistency and errors.
Acting in the wake of a series of incorrect calls at the 2002 World Cup, FIFA’s refereeing committee recommended last month that each official in the trios be of the same nationality, but that idea proved controversial and Blatter did not mention whether it would be implemented.
Ecuador’s Solution
The Ecuador Football Federation has bowed to pressure from five of the six clubs still involved in the league championship race and has agreed to employ foreign referees for the rest of the season.
The federation has called in a dozen referees and linesmen from Argentina and Uruguay for the last five rounds of the tournament at a cost of $80,000.
Ecuador’s league has been plagued by controversial refereeing decisions, most notably those made by World Cup referee Byron Moreno, who was subsequently suspended for 20 games.
Scolari Confirmed
The Portuguese Football Federation on Thursday confirmed that 2002 World Cup-winning coach Luiz Felipe Scolari of Brazil will become Portugal’s national team coach.
Terms of the contract were not revealed, but the federation said Scolari would “assume the technical and organizational command of the first team from January 2003 to July 2004.”
According to Portuguese media reports, Scolari, 54, will earn an estimated $150,000 per month.
“It’s excellent, marvelous, I’m very happy,” Scolari told Reuters in Rio de Janeiro. “The intention is to win the European Championship [which Portugal hosts in 2004].
“After winning the Gulf Cup [as coach of Kuwait in 1990], the Copa Libertadores [as coach of Gremio in 1995 and Palmeiras in 1999] and the World Cup, I think the European Championship is the one that’s missing.
“This is one of the things that made me interested in the offer.”
Bolivian Title
A hat trick by Joaquin Botero helped Bolivar clinch the Bolivian league championship with a 7-1 victory over Wilstermann in the next-to-last game of the season.
Botero leads the league in scoring with 47 goals, one more than Oriente Petrolero’s 19-year-old striker Jose Castillo.
Defenders Retire
Two German Bundesliga defenders, Raymond Kalla of Cameroon and Tomasz Hajto of Poland, announced their retirement from international competition.
Kalla, who plays for VfL Bochum, told the German magazine FussballStars that he was quitting because of Cameroon’s disappointing first-round exit from Korea/Japan ’02 under Coach Winfried Schaefer.
“Schaefer knows exactly what happened,” Kalla said, without amplifying. “We had a team who could have reached the semifinals or the final. Maybe we could have even won the World Cup.”
Hajto, of Schalke 04, played 47 games for Poland but said he does not see eye to eye with Coach Zbigniew Boniek, who took charge of the national team after it too, was eliminated in the first round of the World Cup.
