referee rejecting a penalty review<\/a> after France’s Kylian Mbappe appeared to be tripped by Senegal’s Sadio Mane. <\/p>\nBut for the most part, there have not been too many talking points.<\/p>\n
It is often the way at major tournaments, as players take fewer risks compared to a 38-game league season.<\/p>\n
On average, there is one key match incident (red card, penalty claim etc) in a World Cup fixture. In the Premier League, it is three. That instantly creates the scope for more controversy at league level.<\/p>\n
We should expect refereeing to be the gold standard at the World Cup, too. <\/p>\n
After all, Fifa scoured the globe to select the creme de la creme, the 51 top referees and 30 best video match officials.<\/p>\n
Whisper it, but Pierluigi Collina, Fifa’s head of referees, wants his officials to approach the tournament a bit like a Premier League game.<\/p>\n
Collina’s ethos is that football is a contact sport, and not all contact is a foul. He wants to see free-flowing games at a higher tempo.<\/p>\n
You could pick that wording right out of the Premier League handbook.<\/p>\n
The stats back this up, too. Referees are blowing for far fewer fouls.<\/p>\n
The 2018 World Cup saw 27 fouls per game, while in Qatar four years ago it was 25.<\/p>\n
For this World Cup it is down to 21.7. In the Premier League last season it was 21.6. <\/p>\n
Collina has also reduced the number of cautions per game, with 2.4 well below any other competition or recent World Cup.<\/p>\n
If you change the way a game is being refereed, you must adapt video review too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VAR at the World Cup has not been without its controversies, though. Think of the red card for South Africa’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4962,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}