Clement Turpin has been appointed to referee England’s World Cup opener against Croatia on Wednesday—a decision that would have sent Thomas Tuchel into orbit had he still been in the dugout. The German tactician once labelled Turpin a “Grade E” official, a classification so brutally honest it makes you wonder what the grading system actually measures. Apparently competence is optional.
The beauty of renaming official grades is that nobody knows what they mean anymore. Is “Grade E” the bottom rung, or have we invented a system where E stands for “Excellent but occasionally confused”? FIFA’s refereeing hierarchy has become as transparent as a VAR monitor at midnight—technically there, functionally useless.
What makes this appointment genuinely awkward is that Turpin will have VAR at his disposal, which means he can make mistakes in real time and then review them in slow motion before sticking with the original decision anyway. It’s the theatrical equivalent of asking someone to solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded, then letting them peek at the answer after they’ve already committed to it.
England and Croatia will spend ninety minutes waiting for the inevitable moment when a marginal handball or soft contact becomes a fifty-minute VAR consultation. The players will gather in a semicircle like confused toddlers while Turpin stares at a screen in a dark room, and somewhere in the commentary box, pundits will invoke the phrase “clear and obvious error” until it loses all meaning.
Tuchel’s Grade E assessment was brutal but not inaccurate. Now we get to watch it live on the world’s biggest stage.