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June 16, 2018. Roll the ball in the Kazan Arena. France faces Australia on the first day of their group in the 2018 World Cup. The Gauls arrive as one of the great favorites to win the trophy, while the Australians defend themselves as best they can against the French onslaught.

60th minute of the match. Griezmann falls in the area. The game stops. The referee goes to the VAR (Video Assistant Referee). After the review on the screen, he signals a penalty for France. The Atletico de Madrid player at the time scores. The match ends with a 2 to 1 in favor of ‘Les Bleus’. The play, in the end, goes down in history for being the first in football history where the technology known as VAR was used.

Almost six years under the critic magnifying glass of fans, players and media have made De Burgos Bengoetxea one of Spanish LaLiga’s steel referees. The Basque official is one of the most popular faces of Spanish’s refereeing, making himself a place in the First Division of the country and in international competitions based on hard work and effort. Besides, he has become with the appearance of VAR in one of the referees most linked to this new system. A cocktail of attributes that made him worthy of an important place in Spanish’s football panorama.

It is Sunday at noon in the Terezin ghetto. Everyone in the Dresden barracks is excited: from children to the elderly. The noise is palpable in the environment and comes from the patio. A beep accelerates the incessant tingling in the barracks. The beep is that of a whistle. The whistle is that of a referee. The match of the day has started in the Terezin ghetto League.

Between the Elba and Ohre rivers, just 60 kilometers from Prague, emerges imposing Terezin. Founded in the 18th century, its streets and its walled shape are witnesses of well-known episodes in contemporary history. With an area of ​​less than 15 km², it has played a leading role in the two world wars of the last century. In 1914, Gavrilo Princip was jailed there after perpetrating the well-known murder of Francisco Fernando, inherited from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife. Assassination that ultimately was the trigger for the World War I. During World War II (1939-45), Terezin was used by the Nazis as a passing ghetto for the Jews.

As fans of the sports that we are, we have often seen a record in some competition, either to reach a huge number of goals or to win a race in the shortest possible time. But within these challenges that we are used to see and that appear in the news there are outdated marks that have caught our attention, either because we do not know the data or because they are so rare that they may not be beaten again in a long time.

In LabHipermedia we also like challenges, although we leave the entry into the book Guinness of Records to the true protagonists of the sport. The last thing we set out to do was to create a virtual reality tool that will improve the training of the assistant referees, and that we believe we have fulfilled beyond expectatives with the launch of VAR3D, which you can order in this link.

As we commented in the previous chapters of this serial that traces the history of football through the evolution of its rules, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), an association in charge of preserving football’s rules, was born on June 2, 1886 in London. The goal of its creation was to unify the different, although similar in essence, football rules that the four British federations had drawn up. From this moment, and already ignoring the conflict that occurred between the federations regarding the issue of professionalism, the IFAB emerged as the only entity responsible for developing and preserving football’s rules.

1999. The scoreboard marks the 90th minute at the Camp Nou. The assistant picks up the number three on the light. Three minutes is the time that Bayern München has left to fly with the champions to Germany. Three minutes left for the red devils, with the famous Sir Alex Ferguson in the bench, to come back the 1-0 against. A suspenseful plot sprinkles the Camp Nou. Corner for Manchester. United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel goes up to shoot. David Beckham’s right hand takes the corner. Several rebounds inside the area leave a dead ball in the small area. Teddy Sheringham takes advantage of it and sends the ball to the back of the net. 1-1 and the characteristic British «yes» floods the stands. A minute later, another corner kick from Beckham ends with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scoring, after Sheringham’s extension.

The street and the videogames have often been considered enemies, especially now when it’s not necessary to pay for playing games, or even leave your house, as it happened with the amusement machines. The evolution of the gamer industry started bringing videogames home. This gives everyone, since the first videogame console, the possibility of playing whenever they want. However, some groups started to criticize young people for wasting time in front of the screen instead of doing some sport activities or socializing in the street. At this point, a debate has been fired about the health damages that this fact entails, being the obesity in childhood the main topic of discussion.

Later, the ones who plead for the physical activity could see the balance turned down in their favour with the new “active games” that came videogames that demand the movement on players and subsequently incorporate some level of phisicality, even being at home. With games for the XaviXPort (2004), Domyos (2009), or the iconic Wii Sports (2006) – at this moment, one of the best games of the revolutionary Nintendo’s gadget -, other accessories came such as the motion capture camera for Play Station, the upgraded Eye Toy (2003) or the Xbox 360’s kinnect. All these inventions included games about sport or dance and, with them, the result was the sweating of every kid at the end of the game.

Sports fans, among whom we are included in LabHipermedia, we think that we know all the rules of our favourites, but the sports world is very wide and full of them. We know how the basic rules of our favourite competition are applied, as they are the ones that dictate the game, but there are others that we do not know, as they tend to be unusual occasions or circumstances that occur infrequently. We have compiled seven rules and cases that we are not used to seeing in competitions, either because the rules have been changing over time, others because we have been able to see them and we do not deeply know the protocol while some seem to us practically impossible, but in the world of sport you never know what can happen.

During the month of July, the teams that before pandemic suspended competitions in Spain occupied the top positions in Reto Iberdrola, if we talk about female football, and Second B Division, Third Division and lower categories, in the case of male football, have struggled to reach the goal marked in August 2019: being promoted. Months of uncertainty facing the possibility of having to postpone that dream for another year and months in which the sanitary emergency forced to stop football and sport in Spain.

Finally, season could end with certain singularities and with the fields of play flooded of tears as every year: joy tears from the winners, enrage and sad from the losers. The first could not feel the jubilation of their fans celebrating the achievement as well as the second their warmth and support in probably one of the toughest days in their lives.

When it comes to writing the report of a match or to narrating it through radio or television, the editor/presenter have to make everything possible in order to look for synonyms to name the clubs which are disputing the match. But, surely, they and the readers or listeners have no considered the reason why some clubs are named in curious ways.

Red devils in Manchester? A character of Shakespeare’s Henry IV novel in a football club? Out of the blue, lots of these nicknames do not seem to have too much attachment with reality… And, however, fans have taken on as their own.