The coach and the yellow-and-red manager sharply disagree on the matter of refereeing, marking a historic day for amateur football.

Claudio Ranieri stands with the referees. Precisely in these days when the Italian Referees’ Association has called a strike for the amateur matches in Lazio due to the violence suffered by a match director in Civitavecchia, the yellow-and-red coach in a press conference expressed his full solidarity towards the referees: “We must know how to respect them. “They are people just like us and they can make mistakes. When I was playing, they made even more mistakes.” This begins Ranieri’s speech, who then went on to also discuss VAR: “Even VAR makes mistakes at times, but if we analyze the errors of old and those now, we must be thankful for the level we’ve reached. We can debate it, but always with respect.” However, the words of the yellow-red coach sharply contrast with what the sporting director Florent Ghisolfi said in recent days: “Our difficulty is not a reason to let everyone walk over us. We demand respect and fairness, the seven mistakes are a fact, we ask for fairness because it’s too much.” This had been the message reiterated by the French before Roma-Atalanta. The two positions, therefore, appear to be diametrically opposed. In such a critical moment, Ranieri doesn’t want to give his team any excuses and above all, he doesn’t want to criticize a profession which according to him, is “the hardest job to do in Italian football.”