Wexford-born Michelle O’Neill has been selected by FIFA to be part of the officiating team at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand this summer.

She is among a total of 33 referees, 55 assistant referees, and 19 video match officials based on the officials’ quality and the performances delivered at FIFA tournaments as well as at other international and domestic competitions in recent years.

This will be O’Neill’s third FIFA World Cup having also been on the list for Canada in 2015 and France in 2019. She was one of the assistant referees for the World Cup Final that year between the United States and the Netherlands.

“As always, the criteria we have used is ‘quality first’ and the selected on-field match officials represent the highest level of refereeing worldwide,” said the chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee, Pierluigi Collina.

“We all remember the very successful FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019 in France. The high standard of refereeing contributed significantly to that success. The aim for the FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023 is to repeat that success and to convince again with excellent referees’ performances.”

The ‘Road to Australia & New Zealand’ project started back in 2020, with more than 170 candidate match officials going through intensive preparation. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, this preparation was anything but easy as in-presence activities were suspended for a long period.

“Even though the pandemic affected our activities, we had enough time to provide the candidates with good preparation. As we did for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, we are announcing these selections well in advance to be able to work in a purposeful and focused manner with all those who have been appointed for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, monitoring them over the coming months,” continued Collina.

“With critical time lost due to the pandemic in preparation for the Women’s World Cup, we developed some new programmes to accelerate our referee development, such as our very effective Tracking & Support programme, where each referee candidate was assigned a FIFA coach who provided feedback on their matches each month,” added Kari Seitz, FIFA’s Head of Women Refereeing.

“This programme will continue to be critical in the final phase of preparation for the FIFA Women’s World Cup.”

Sport for Business Perspective:

The development of Women referees is vItal, but it should not only be seen as being for the Women’s game. It is worth having it exclusively female for one more round but in the same way as the inclusion of women officials for the Men’s tournament at Qatar 2022 was applauded, we do need to consider that male and female refs should be welcome and encouraged equally in all aspects of the sport.