Roberto Rosetti

Italian football referee

Roberto Rosetti (born 18 September 1967) is an Italian former football referee. He is fluent in Italian (native), English and French. He started refereeing in 1983, and took charge of his first match in the Italian Serie A in 1996. He received his FIFA Badge in 2002. Aside from his refereeing duties, Rosetti works as director of a hospital. Rosetti is counted amongst the top referees of all time in a list maintained by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS). He retired following the 2010 FIFA World Cup to take a position with the Italian Football Federation as the referee designator for Serie B League. Luciano Moggi, then general director of Juventus, had described Rosetti and his colleague Pierluigi Collina as being too 'objective' in an intercepted telephone call. Moggi also claimed that Rosetti and Collina should be 'punished' for decisions made against Juventus in that same phonecall. Rosseti is currently the Chief Refereeing Officer and Chairman of the Referees Committee at UEFA.

Rosetti was preselected as a referee for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. His first match of the tournament was a 1–1 draw between Ghana and Australia. Rosetti sent Australia's Harry Kewell off for handling the ball on the goal line, awarding Ghana a penalty kick. The next game he refereed was the Argentina–Mexico game in the Round of 16, which Argentina won 3–1; the match was surrounded by controversy, however, as Rosetti and his team of officials incorrectly allowed Carlos Tevez's opening goal to stand, even though replays later showed that it should have been ruled out for offside. Rosetti was later left off the list of 19 referees announced by FIFA to take part in the rest of the competition although football's world governing body did not explain why. This decision affected Rosetti greatly and was the major reason behind his immediate retirement following the tournament, although he denied that it was his error that led him to retire.

Rosetti was hired by the Russian Football Union in 2011 to oversee the domestic referees' department but resigned in 2013 for family reasons. In 2018, UEFA announced that Rosetti would become their Chief Refereeing Officer and Chairman of the Referees Committee, succeeding Pierluigi Collina, who became chairman of FIFA's referees committee. Collina assigned Rosetti to be the VAR Refereeing Project Leader at the 2018 FIFA World Cup to help implement the VAR system.