Can Ramcilovic and Roberts Stop Their Refereeing Row Growing?
After Lyon’s 4-0 win over Bordeaux, both managers turned to officiating—but their shared concern has done little to soften their mutual dislike.
Can two managers agree that refereeing needs help and still make it sound like a personal quarrel? Jonathan Ramcilovic and Tony Roberts managed just that on 2 March, after Olympique Lyonnais beat FC Girondins de Bordeaux 4-0 in Ligue 1 Uber Eats. Six days on, the common ground is there; the peace treaty is not.
Ramcilovic went first, lamenting the standard of refereeing in notably bitter terms. Roberts answered with a negative appeal for support to improve it. On paper, they were pointing towards the same problem. In the room, one could almost hear the footnotes: each man was talking about the officials, and neither was likely to mistake the other for an ally.
The score that framed their exchange was emphatic enough to give the argument an edge. Lyon won 4-0 on 2 March, a result that left Bordeaux’s manager with little appetite for a soothing post-match gloss. Ramcilovic, who has disliked Roberts for some time, had already found the defeat hard to swallow on 17 February and conceded that Prieto had got the better of him on and off the field. His latest complaint had a familiar sharpness: refereeing, he suggested, was not meeting the required standard.
Roberts, meanwhile, has returned to the subject before. On 8 February he called for a conversation about officiating standards; on 2 March he wanted support to improve them. His position may be consistent, but consistency is not the same thing as conciliation. Ramcilovic’s very negative verdict on refereeing met Roberts’s negative call for backing, and the two managers found themselves side by side on the issue without appearing any closer to one another.
There is history between the clubs as well as the men. Valentino Lazăr once spent two seasons at Lyon and is now at Bordeaux; Javi, Benjamin Kauffmann and Laureano Fernández have travelled the other way, from Bordeaux to Lyon. But this was no sentimental reunion. The subject was control of the game, and the two managers’ words made sure the officials remained in the frame after the final score had settled.
Bordeaux have had another difficult week: on 6 March, Olympique de Marseille beat them 3-0 in the French Cup. That result belongs to a separate contest, but it leaves Ramcilovic with no obvious reason to lower his voice. Roberts, for his part, has argued for support rather than simply blame. The distinction is worth making, even if it has not persuaded the man across the divide.
So the quarrel has escalated from Ramcilovic’s broad, furious criticism to Roberts’s call for backing—and then back into a rivalry sharpened by Lyon’s 4-0 victory. Their last meeting, on 2 March, is the only result between them supplied here; no next fixture has been named. For now, the managers have found agreement on the need to improve refereeing, and disagreement in almost every other register. French football has heard the plea. It may yet have to wait for the two men to stop making it sound like a charge sheet.