GdS: Poor officiating by Fabbri in Milan-Spezia despite no major mistakes

By Isak Möller -

AC Milan’s fixture against Spezia seems to do something strange to the referees. The clash last season was very controversial, with a huge mistake from the referee, and yesterday’s game was also a poor one in that respect. 

Michael Fabbri was the man in charge of yesterday’s game and while he didn’t make any huge mistakes, the whole game was handled poorly. In fact, Gazzetta Dello Sport (via SempreMilan) gave him a 4/10 for his display.

It took five minutes for VAR to check Theo Hernandez’s opener for offside, which was the fault of head VAR referee Luca Banti and not Fabbri. The latter should have given Emil Holm a yellow card after a tactical foul in the first half, but didn’t.

Fabbri ruled out Sandro Tonali’s goal after an on-field review in the 65th minute, which cannot be categorised as a mistake, but he was wrong to give Olivier Giroud the first yellow card. Tonali’s yellow was also too harsh, per the newspaper.

As said, there were no huge mistakes but Fabbri lost too much control of the game.

Tags AC Milan Michael Fabbri Spezia

7 Comments

  1. Fabbri did the same against Milan back in 2019 where Milan lost against Juve 2-1. In that match, Fabbri didn’t award Milan a pinalty kick after Alex Sandro handsball in pinalty box. Then later he awarded Juve a pinalty after Mussachio tackle the ball but Dybala suddenly goes down.

    Some people clearly wants to take down Milan really bad because this isn’t the first time where Milan got harmed by referee bad mistakes.

  2. I’m not sure Tomori’s fault was sufficient to cancel Tonali’s goal.
    He touched the ball, and the contact wasn’t so harsh.
    He didn’t hesitated for a second despite the fact that the fault was like a minute before the goal itself.

    1. If they start canceling goals due to such fouls they will have to disallow 1/3 of all goals that are made. Is that what people really want?

      1. No this is what everyone was afraid of when VAR was introduced. Now anytime anyone scores the refs can (at their discretion) just go through the whole build up and decide if the goal stands or not based. Now instead of joy when Milan scores I feel dread and fear that it will be disallowed over some bs foul that would have never been spotted without super slow motion cameras. It’s not in the sport of the game. It’s complete rubbish especially in a league known for its mafia affiliation and related scandals. I was a supporter of VAR but it turns out you can’t eliminate errors unless you eliminate the humans making them.

        1. I was a supporter too but seen this thing ruining the game now. Not only football but ice hockey as well. Instead of “justice” this is more of a tool for referees to decide how the game ends/develops.

          The idea behind it is good but what needs to be done is to loosen the rules so to speak. A millimeter or even centimeter here or there does not matter. Not in offsides, not in fouls. And certainly if the measuring takes more than 10 seconds.

          1. FFS it took them 5 minutes to try and see if they can find Theo’s toenail in an offside positions – and failed! If that is not ruining the game I don’t know what is.

  3. If this Milan gets this type of officiating twenty times in a league year , they struggle to be on seria A. More than twenty wrong decisions against Milan. It could not have been incompetence or error. He was just out to destroy Milan. Milan management out to call for a review of his decisions to discourage future biased officiating against the Club .

Comments are closed

Serie A Standings

Live football scores . Current table, fixtures & results.