Today it seems normal to us: thereferee puts his hand in his breast pocket, raises a tag colorful and the whole stadium instantly understands what is happening. But until fifty years ago, football was a mess of linguistic misunderstandings. The tags yellow and red they were not born from a deliberate decision by FIFA, but from a communication misunderstanding during the 1966 World Cup between the German referee Rudolf Kreitlein and an Argentine footballer and by an illumination from the head of the referees commission Ken Aston had in the middle of the London traffic. This innovation transformed a game of incomprehensible words into a universal visual languageborrowing logic from traffic lights.
The sending off that revolutionized football
It all began on July 23, 1966during a World Cup quarter-final that to describe as “tense” would be an understatement: England against Argentina. There was crazy electricity on the pitch. The referee of the match was the German Rudolf Kreitlein, who however spoke neither English nor Spanish. At minute 35 the unexpected happened: Kreitlein decided to expel the Argentine captainAntonio Rattín, for protests. Despite not understanding Spanish, the referee interpreted Rattín’s attitude and facial expressions as offensive, considering them real insults to his authority.
The problem? Rattín didn’t understand German and the referee couldn’t explain himself. The Argentine captain he refused to come out for a good eleven minutes, clamoring for an interpreter. In a gesture of defiance that went down in history, before leaving he sat down on the red carpet reserved for Queen Elizabeth II and wrinkled a small English flag.
But the confusion didn’t end there. In that same match, the English brothers Bobby and Jack Charlton were booked, but they only found out the following day by reading the newspapers, because at the time they didn’t understand the referee’s gestures. It was clear that the verbal system had failed.
In the stands, watching that communication disasterthere was English Ken Astonthen head of the FIFA referees commission. Aston knew well what the tension on the pitch meant: he had been the referee of the infamous “Battle of Santiago” of 1962 between Chile and Italy, a match so violent that it required police intervention. That July evening at Wembley, Aston understood that something new was needed: a signal that needed no translation.
Intuition at the traffic lights on Kensington High Street
The solution came not during an official meeting, but while Aston was driving his car home. Stop at one intersection on Kensington High Street, London, observed the stoplight go from green to yellow and finally to red. He had the decisive intuition: if billions of people around the world associated yellow with caution and red with stop sign, why not bring that code to the football field? The yellow would have been the warning (“be careful”), the red the definitive stop (“you’re out”).
When he returned home, he explained the idea to his wife Hilde, who with great practical sense went into another room and returned with two little ones. colored cards cut out for the occasion, just the right size to fit in the breast pocket of a uniform. The idea was brilliant in its simplicity: color eliminated the language barrier. A Russian player, a Brazilian referee and a Japanese fan would have understood the sanction at the exact same moment. Although the intuition dates back to 1966, FIFA waited until 1970 to test the system.
May 31, 1970, the day of the debut of cards in the world of football
The official debut took place in World Cup in Mexico 1970chosen not by chance because they were the first to be broadcast in full color on television. The first yellow card of history was drawn on May 31, 1970 by the German referee Kurt Tschenscher during the inaugural match Mexico-USSR: the Soviet Kakhi Asatiani received it. A curiosity? In the entire ’70 World Cup not even a red card was drawn. To see the first “chromatic” expulsion we had to wait for Germany 1974, when the Chilean Carlos Caszely entered the annals for the wrong reason.
From that moment until today, the numbers on expulsions and yellow cards have reached astonishing figures. The world record for highest number of reds in a single match belongs to a match in the Argentine fifth division in 2011: the referee Damian Rubino, after a colossal brawl, sent off well 36 people including players, reserves and technical staff. Another incredible case was Josip Šimunić’s Croatia-Australia match at the 2006 World Cup, which received three yellow cards in the same match before finally being sent off: a refereeing error that remains in football history.
