Football produces more than its share of controversy, but the moments that tend to linger longest are the ones where the officials get it spectacularly wrong.
Not by a fraction, not in a way that requires slow-motion replays to confirm, but in ways so obvious and so consequential that the sport was left permanently changed.
What follows is a collection of ten of the worst officiating moments in football history, ranging from the genuinely baffling to the darkly comic.
The Referee Who Kicked a Player
Most refereeing errors involve a poor decision. Tony Chapron managed to combine a poor decision with an act of physical retaliation against a player.
During a Ligue 1 match between Nantes and PSG, Nantes defender Diego Carlos accidentally caught Chapron's heel while sprinting back to defend.
It was an incidental collision with no malicious intent whatsoever. Chapron, having fallen to the turf, responded by swinging his leg at Carlos and catching him on the shin.
What followed made the situation considerably worse. Rather than acknowledging what had happened, Chapron produced a second yellow card for Carlos, sending him off. The Nantes bench, the crowd, and even PSG players reacted with visible disbelief.
Several days later, the red card was overturned and Chapron received a six-month suspension. The sequence of events, from the initial kick to the subsequent dismissal of the player he had kicked, remains one of the most surreal episodes in the history of officiating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C42N54l5sfM
The Referee Who Scored a Goal and Awarded It
If Chapron's incident represents officiating at its most combustible, Dutch referee Maurice Paarhuis contributed something at the more absurd end of the spectrum.
During a fourth-tier match in the Netherlands between Hoek and Harkemase, a cross into the penalty area produced a scramble that ended with Paarhuis, caught in the chaos of the goalmouth, striking the ball into the net himself.
He then awarded the goal.
Harkemase players surrounded him in protest, but Paarhuis held firm. His position was technically defensible: under the laws of the game at the time, the referee was considered part of the field of play.
That a referee had effectively scored and then acknowledged his own goal as valid had, however, not previously been encountered.
The Pitch Invader Who Scored
In a Honduran league match between Olimpia and Motagua, a sequence of events unfolded in stoppage time that no regulations had adequately prepared anyone for.
Olimpia were pushing for an equaliser when a shirtless supporter ran onto the pitch, received the ball, and scored.
Simultaneously, Olimpia's Roger Rojas was bearing down on goal with a separate ball and also scored. Two goals, two different footballers, one of whom was not a footballer at all, scored at approximately the same moment.
The referee pointed to the centre circle. Rojas was credited with the goal and the match was recorded as 2-2. The pitch invader received no official credit, though his contribution to the move remains, in any reasonable analysis, the most unusual assist ever recorded.
The Red Card Given to the Wrong Player
In a Premier League match between Arsenal and Chelsea, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain handled the ball on the goal line to prevent Eden Hazard's shot from going in. The offence was clear, the correct response equally clear: red card for Oxlade-Chamberlain.
Referee Andre Marriner issued the red card to Kieran Gibbs instead.
Oxlade-Chamberlain immediately informed Marriner that he had the wrong player. Marriner maintained his decision. Arsenal later appealed on the grounds that Hazard's shot had been going wide in any case, and ultimately neither player was punished.
The incident joined a short but memorable list of cases of mistaken identity in officiating, alongside Chris Foy's booking of the wrong Da Silva twin, though as has been noted, Fabio and Rafael made that particular error considerably harder to avoid.
Three Yellow Cards for One Player
To receive a second yellow card in a match and be sent off is commonplace. To receive a second yellow card and remain on the pitch, then receive a third yellow card before finally being dismissed, requires a particularly unusual set of circumstances.
Graham Poll provided those circumstances at the 2006 World Cup during Australia's group-stage match against Croatia. Croatia's Josip Simunic was booked in the sixty-first minute, booked again in the ninetieth minute, and remained on the pitch.
After the final whistle, Simunic shouted at Poll, earning a third yellow card, at which point Poll finally produced the red.
Poll has acknowledged the error publicly in the years since. At the time, it made him arguably the most discussed referee at a World Cup for entirely the wrong reasons.
Luis Suarez's Biting Goes Unseen
Luis Suarez bit opponents on three separate occasions across his career. The first, at Ajax against PSV's Otman Bakkal, earned a seven-match ban. The second, at Liverpool against Branislav Ivanovic, produced a ten-match suspension.
The third came at the 2014 World Cup, when Suarez bit Italy's Giorgio Chiellini on the shoulder during a group-stage match. Chiellini immediately showed the bite mark to the referee. The referee did not act.
While the Italian players were still protesting, Uruguay won a corner from which Diego Godin scored the only goal of the match, sending Uruguay through to the knockout stage.
Suarez received a lengthy ban and was unable to participate as Uruguay were eliminated in the round of sixteen by Colombia.
The sequence of events, in which an unpunished bite contributed to a goal that changed the direction of a World Cup, remains one of the competition's stranger subplots.
Harald Schumacher and the Foul That Was Not Called
The 1982 World Cup semi-final between West Germany and France produced one of the most discussed moments of non-intervention in the history of the sport.
France's Patrick Battiston broke clear and was bearing down on goal when West German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher came out and collided with him at considerable force.
Battiston was left unconscious on the pitch, had broken ribs, and lost several teeth. Schumacher returned to his goal area and prepared for a goal kick.
The referee did not call a foul. He did not issue any card. The match continued.
France lost on penalties. The image of Battiston lying motionless while Schumacher stood nearby with apparent indifference became one of football's most enduring symbols of injustice. No officiating decision was actually made: that was the problem.
Geoff Hurst's Goal That May Not Have Been
England's 4-2 victory over West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final remains the defining moment in English football history. One of the four goals, however, has never been fully settled.
In extra time, Hurst struck a shot that hit the crossbar, bounced down, and came back into play. The linesman signalled a goal. The referee awarded it. England went on to win.
Modern analysis conducted by researchers at Oxford University suggests the ball did not fully cross the line, falling approximately eighteen centimetres short.
The analysis has not resolved the debate to everyone's satisfaction, but it has ensured that the goal remains contested territory more than half a century later.
It is the most famous phantom goal in football's history, though several others have followed it…
Thomas Helmer scored a goal for Bayern Munich in 1994 having visibly missed the target; the German FA annulled the result and ordered a replay.
Luis Garcia's flick against Chelsea in the 2005 Champions League semi-final may or may not have crossed the line; the goal stood and Liverpool went to Istanbul.
Stefan Kiessling headed the ball into the side netting for Leverkusen in 2013 and it was awarded because it had passed through a hole.
Frank Lampard's shot that bounced clearly over the line against Germany at the 2010 World Cup was not given, with England trailing 2-1 at the time.
Maradona's Hand of God
England's experience in 2010 was painful enough. Their experience in 1986 remains, for many, the definitive example of a refereeing failure altering the course of a competition.
In the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against Argentina, Diego Maradona jumped for a loose ball alongside goalkeeper Peter Shilton and punched it into the net with his left hand.
Every England player immediately protested. The referee and his assistants saw nothing. The goal stood.
Four minutes later, Maradona scored again, this time through an eleven-second run past most of England's outfield players that was voted the Goal of the Century. Argentina won 2-1 and went on to win the tournament.
Maradona later described the first goal as having been scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God."
The phrase has outlasted almost everything else connected to the match, which says something about how thoroughly the incident embedded itself in football's history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2OvD-J0xt4
Thierry Henry and the Goal That Changed the Rules
In a 2009 World Cup qualifying play-off, France and Ireland were level on aggregate in extra time when Henry controlled the ball with his hand, twice, before squaring it to William Gallas, who headed in the decisive goal. France progressed to the 2010 World Cup. Ireland did not.
Henry admitted the handball immediately after the match. FIFA declined to order a replay. The Irish Football Association's formal request for intervention was rejected.
The furore that followed the decision contributed meaningfully to the conversation around the introduction of video assistant referee technology.
VAR was not implemented immediately, and the road to its adoption was long and contested, but Henry's handball is regularly cited as one of the moments that made the case for additional officiating support impossible to dismiss.
A decision that ended Ireland's World Cup journey ultimately helped change how the game is officiated everywhere.
Dishonorable Mention: Byron Moreno at the 2002 World Cup
Byron Moreno's performance in the South Korea versus Italy match at the 2002 World Cup generated accusations of bias so intense that they have never fully receded.
Across the course of the match:
Moreno awarded a penalty for a challenge that most observers considered marginal at best
Ignored an elbow by Italy's Christian Vieri on a South Korean player
Sent off Francesco Totti for a dive that replays suggested was actually a foul
Failed to act when Lee Chun-Soo connected with Paolo Maldini's head
And disallowed what appeared to be a legitimate golden goal by Damiano Tommasi for offside.
Italy were eliminated.
The suspicions surrounding the performance intensified when Moreno received a suspension from the Ecuadorian Football Association later in 2002 for match-fixing in domestic football. They intensified further in 2010 when he was arrested at a New York airport carrying a substantial quantity of heroin.
Whether the 2002 match was fixed has never been formally established. The officiating, by almost any standard of evaluation, was exceptional in the worst possible sense.
When the Whistle Goes Wrong
The errors gathered here range from simple human mistakes made in the heat of competition to decisions that altered the outcomes of World Cups. Some produced rule changes. Others produced only outrage that eventually faded.
What they share is a reminder that football, for all its structure and regulation, remains a sport in which human judgment operates under enormous pressure and occasionally fails in ways that reverberate for decades.
The officials who got these calls wrong were not necessarily incompetent across their careers. They made mistakes in moments when mistakes had the worst possible consequences.
The sport has responded by introducing technology, additional officials, and revised procedures. The errors keep coming regardless.
That is what makes refereeing, for all its thanklessness, one of the more genuinely difficult jobs in sport.