Former Egyptian Premier League referee Mohamed Nofal is pinning his hopes on the new president of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) that he will improve the standard of refereeing which has taken several hits in the last few years and most recently last month.

Nofal, who served as a referee from 1985-1990, was speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly shortly after Hani Abu Reeda returned as president of the EFA for a four-year term. A former president of the EFA from 2016-2019, the 71-year-old FIFA Council member and CAF Executive Committee member won the EFA elections last week with his whole slate, which includes eight members, by acclamation.

“I hope that the Referees Committee will be elected and completely independent, like the English Referees Committee,” Nofal said, pointing to a statement by Abu Reeda that improving the performance of referees will be among his board’s top priorities.

Last month the EFA dismissed the board of the Referees Committee after controversy erupted over leaked troubling recordings between a referee and the VAR in the Egyptian Premier League during a close game.

In recent years the EFA hired two foreign heads for the Referees Committee, though neither appointment yielded the desired outcomes.

Renowned English referee Mark Clattenburg was appointed as head of the Referees Committee in August 2022 to streamline operations and improve perceptions of refereeing. However, Clattenburg resigned five months into the task, saying he feared for his life after a heated dispute with then-Zamalek president Mortada Mansour.

In March 2023, veteran Portuguese referee Vitor Pereira took over the committee, with a tenure set to end after the 2023-24 season. However, Pereira failed to improve the situation on the ground or fans’ perception of referee bias amid a series of controversial incidents.

Nofal hoped that the new head of the Referees Committee would be Egyptian. “By the time a foreign referee gets to know the referees here, one by one, his tenure would have been up.”

He added that the foreign referees who take charge in Egypt focus primarily on the Premier League “even though we have five levels, with the top two levels being professional leagues. Below this are the semi-professional and amateur levels, not to mention many age groups. The head of the referees is supposed to be in charge of all this but the Premier League gets the lion’s share of attention.”

Nofal said Egypt’s Referees Committee should break away from the EFA “to ensure its credibility and integrity”. There was no suggestion that the committee was compromised in any way, but Nofal said he thought it best that it becomes a separate entity to show impartiality.

Noting that in England, the referees are not fully independent in that the Premier League and Football League appointments are made by the Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) who are a separate company jointly owned by the FA, the Premier League and Football League, Nofal agreed but questioned where else would they get the funding. “But a referees committee composed of former officials that has authority over refereeing in that territory, even if funded by the league, would be an improvement over the present situation.”

On the trend the last several years appointing a local referee to adjudicate the big Egyptian derby between crosstown rivals Ahly and Zamalek, Nofal said it was better than hiring foreign referees in dollars. “Good Egyptian refs are just as good as their foreign counterparts, if not better.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly