Soccer referees may be the most powerless officials in professional sports. They take an incredible amount of verbal abuse from players when a call doesn’t go their way and for the most part their behavior goes unpunished.
Well one official took a stand and he paid dearly for it, according to a story via Deadspin. During a game in Russia between reserve teams Amkar Perm and Terek Grozny, linesman Musa Kadyrov, lost his cool and assaulted Amkar defender Ilya Krichmar after he said something slick to him.
Krichmar denied the referee’s claims that he said something about his mother.
“We weren’t happy with the officiating, words had been exchanged but I had never said anything personal about him or his mother,” he said. “I know how sensitive Chechen people are.”
Unfortunately for Kadyrov, this isn’t the first time an incident like this occurred, so the Chechen soccer organization had to come down heavily on the official, banning him for life.
Check the video of the incident here:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFaStk7_1rQ?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]