Emanuela Rusta (30) has had enough. The referee has made her Instagram account private. What is behind this drastic decision?
It is likely that the Albanian woman wants to prevent hate comments after possible wrong decisions. But Rusta apparently has other motives.
Albanian referee: “It’s not a question of gender”
The referee, who became the first woman to referee a match in the Albanian SuperLiga in 2022 and has been her country’s first FIFA referee in women’s football since 2019, is fed up with sexist comments and headlines.
In the past, she liked to show herself in a revealing manner on Instagram, delighting her followers with bikini photos and snapshots of her workouts.
But because of the reactions, she feels that she is not taken seriously as a referee. “The sexy referee who raises the temperature,” was the headline of an Albanian newspaper in the past. “They should concentrate on my professionalism rather than other things,” Rusta said in an AFP interview.
“Match refereeing is not a question of gender, but of competence,” said Rusa, who refereed the match between Real Madrid and Sporting Lisbon in the Women’s Champions League on Thursday (September 19, 2024). But she has to work hard to be accepted.
She receives support in her home country. “The Albanian Referee Association has always been keen to promote women. My case is therefore neither a coincidence nor the end of the development,” says Rusa. “I hope that the day is not too far away when four women referee a top-class men’s game.”
So far, there has been one female referee who has made it to the Champions League and even the World Cup in the men’s competition: Frenchwoman Stéphanie Frappart (40) refereed the DFB team’s preliminary round match against Costa Rica at the World Cup in Qatar. In Germany, Bibiana Steinhaus-Webb (45) was the first woman to referee matches in men’s professional football.
