Vitoria manages the Lisbon VAR

PSG will fulfill the dream of finally playing the Champions League final. The Bayern, the one to return to be a roller that wants to rise with his sixth orejona. But there are also others who will put their illusions on the pitch of the Estadio da Luz on Sunday in the final of the Champions League. One of them is Roberto Díaz Pérez del Palomar, Vitorian assistant referee. Yesterday he was confirmed as one of those chosen to deliver justice in one of the summit appointments of the football calendar.

He will be one of the four referees who supervise the development of the meeting on television. But not just any screen. They will be the ones who manage the new Big Brother of football, the team that leads the VAR, the video refereeing that has changed football. He successfully broke into the 2018 World Cup and has already been a fixture in the Champions League since the last 16 of last season. This year he will live his second final on an unprecedented stage, a tournament of reduced format and a single venue behind closed doors.

Díaz Pérez del Palomar, 44 years old and with more than two decades of experience in arbitration, it will be, what UEFA calls, the offside VAR. Joining him will be Italians Massimiliano Irrati (main VAR), Marco Guida (VAR assistant) and Spanish Alejandro Hernández Hernández, in charge of providing support with the tool. The quartet that referees on the pitch will also have an Italian majority. From there are the referee, Daniele Orsato, and his two linesmen, Lorenzo Manganelli and Alessandro Giallatini. Ovidiu Hațegan, the fourth referee, is from Romania.

The meeting represents a new summit in the career of Roberto Díaz Pérez del Palomar. Although he will not step on the grass yet, it will be his first Champions League final. It was already on the green in one more than a decade ago. So, he accompanied Medina Cantalejo at Şükrü Saracoğlu in Istanbul to be his assistant in the UEFA Cup final between Shaktar Donetsk and Werder Bremen.

It was the beginning of a period of big dates. As were the three U-20 World Cups, the great competition in lower categories on the international scene, in which he refereed. She was in the tournaments of Turkey in 2013, New Zealand in 2015 and South Korea in 2017. She also participated in the 2016 Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro.

World Cup 2018

This year he was preparing for the Eurocup. Appointments were still to be made, which will have to wait until next year. There will also end a qualifying phase in which he has also refereed. She was in November at Wembley for England-Montenegro and a month earlier in Warsaw for Poland-North Macedonia.

What he can cross off his list is the World Cup, the great tournament on the international scene, “the most powerful event”, as he confessed in an interview to this medium in 2016. At that time, he did not know that he was going to accompany Mateu Lahoz in the World Cup that was played just two years later in Russia . The Denmark-Australia and Iceland-Croatia, both from the group stage, remain in their history, which now adds a new page.

He and the rest of his colleagues have had to live in Lisbon in a bubble. It has been a single venue with two stadiums and strict security measures to avoid contagion that would have compromised the development of the tournament. PCRs have become regular companions like the pennant or the whistle.