After having been the first woman to referee a Men’s Euro football matchthe French Stéphanie Frappart will become, on Thursday, the first woman to referee a match of the men’s World Cup, in Qatar, during the meeting between Germany and Costa Rica, announced, Tuesday, November 29, FIFA.
Stéphanie Frappart is one of the three women selected among the thirty-six field referees of this World Cup with the Rwandan Salima Mukansanga and the Japanese Yoshimi Yamashita. Three others are on the linesman roster.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar is the logical continuation of a meteoric rise in the career of 38-year-old Stéphanie Frappart. First female referee in the French second division (in 2014), then in the men’s Ligue 1 (in 2019), in the European Supercup (in August 2019), in the Champions League (in December 2020) and in the final of the Coupe de France ( on May 7), she will continue to make history on Thursday at Al-Bayt Stadium.
Now very well established in the French and European landscape of arbitration, she had officiated as fourth referee during two meetings of this group phase of the 2022 World Cup: Mexico-Poland and Portugal-Ghana. The video game FIFA has also integrated it into its latest edition.
“The result of a long process”
“A World Cup is the pinnacle, the biggest competition in the world”, she explained at the end of September during a press briefing in Clairefontaine, after her appointment for the trip to Qatar. Rather than a personal accomplishment, she preferred to see “the enhancement of French arbitration”.
female referees “have been chaining high-flying performances for several years”greeted the legend of arbitration, the Italian Pierluigi Collina, at the start of the 2022 World Cup. “For us, they are only official referees. And that’s the message I gave them: ‘You’re not here because you’re women, you’re here because you’re FIFA referees’”added the president of the commission of referees of the world body.
“Their appointment is the result of a long process that began several years ago, which began with the appointment of women for certain FIFA senior and youth men’s competitions”he said again, hoping “that in the future the presence of female referees in high-level male competitions [sera] considered the rule rather than the exception..
Campaign launched by the French Football Federation
Finding a woman in charge of a high-level men’s match is still too rare for the moment. In major leagues, the pioneer was the German Bibiana Steinhaus, first referee in the Bundesliga, between 2017 and 2021. In September 2017, at the whistle for the meeting of Hertha Berlin and Werder Bremen, she became the first woman in the history of football to lead a professional Division 1 match in Europe.
The presence of women in match management remains exceptional, even at amateur level. For example, they are only a thousand in France, or 4% of the contingent of referees, according to figures from the French Football Federation (FFF).
The rise of Stéphanie Frappart is the culmination of a campaign launched by the FFF in January 2019, which provided for a plan to professionalize elite female referees by “an increase in the human and material resources made available to female officials, a strengthening of their preparation, as well as an evolution of the compensation system, in order to provide them with the best conditions for the exercise of arbitration”.