UEFA has announced the full list of assistant referees and additional assistant referees who will join the 12 referees already selected to officiate at Euro 2012 matches in Ukraine and Poland, reads a statement posted on UEFA's official Web site.
The UEFA Referees Committee came to its decision on the assistant referees and additional assistant referees after closely monitoring their progress in recent UEFA club competition matches.
Twelve Euro 2012 referees were chosen last December, in particular, Cuneyt Cakir (Turkey), Jonas Eriksson (Sweden), Viktor Kassai (Hungary), Bjorn Kuipers (the Netherlands), Stephane Lannoy (France), Pedro Proenca (Portugal), Nicola Rizzoli (Italy), Damir Skomina (Slovenia), Wolfgang Stark (Germany), Craig Thomson (Scotland), Carlos Velasco Carballo (Spain), and Howard Webb (England).
Marcin Borski (Poland), Tom Harald Hagen (Norway), Pavel Kralovec (the Czech Republic) and Viktor Shvetsov (Ukraine) became fourth officials who will only act in this specific function.
Each team is made up of five match officials from the same country: one main referee, two additional assistant referees who are also FIFA referees, and two FIFA assistant referees. In addition, a third assistant referee from each country has also been named, and he will remain on standby until the start of the tournament, to take the place of a colleague if required.
A total of 80 match officials – the six officials in each team, as well as the previously selected four fourth officials and four reserve assistant referees – will attend the Euro 2012 Referee Preparatory Workshop, which will be held in Warsaw from April 30 to May 3. During this course, on May 2, all officials will undergo a FIFA fitness test and the final selection of the quintets will follow that test.
The additional assistant referees are being deployed at Euro 2012 as part of a continuing experiment authorized by football’s lawmakers, the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The additional assistants stand on the goal line and help the referee in the decision-making process, especially with regard to penalty-area incidents.
Euro 2012, featuring 16 teams, will be played at eight venues – Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and Wroclaw (Poland), and Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Lviv (Ukraine) – between June 8 and July 1.
