Pedro Proença called the meeting and not one referee turned up, and then another audio leaked
Leaked audio of Pedro Proença criticising Portuguese refereeing has set the game alight. Referees refused the meeting at Cidade do Futebol and the FPF president says the clips are distorted.
Pedro Proença asked for the meeting himself. He rang the Portuguese referees’ association on Tuesday night, set it for ten the next morning at Cidade do Futebol — and not a single referee showed up. It went ahead anyway, online, with association president José Borges and a few other officials. From the men in black, nobody.
What is actually on the Proença audio clips?
The excerpts circulating online catch the current head of the Portuguese football federation speaking very freely about the state of refereeing in Portugal. He says referees are very weak and that, on a good day, you can find three or four reasonably competent ones — naming Artur Soares Dias, João Pinheiro, Nuno Almeida and Luís Godinho. Other passages touch on José Fontelas Gomes and on trips to the Judicial Police over cases involving Benfica.
The recordings are old. By Proença’s own account they come from the meetings he held with clubs while campaigning for the FPF presidency, roughly two years ago. On Wednesday a further clip surfaced, this one about the lack of renewal in the profession — the idea that no new generation is coming through.
Why did the referees refuse to meet him?
Because the association had already condemned the content and asked for a clear explanation of the context and the reasoning behind it, and because if you are the person refereeing a top-flight game this weekend, hearing your own federation president call you weak is not something a hastily arranged meeting fixes. Not one of them was willing to attend.
Proença responded publicly that these are fragments of private, informal conversations, truncated and stripped of context, and said he will pursue legal action — the federation stresses the recordings were obtained illegally. Official statements are being posted on the FPF website.
The timing could hardly be worse. The league kicks off in days, after a record-breaking summer in the transfer market, and the first big argument of the season is not about football at all. It is about who runs refereeing, and who still trusts whom.
By Vasco Almada
Image: Oleg Dubyna (doa.in.ua) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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