Read 4 minutesUpdated: 18 July 2026 06:28 PM IST
Slavko Vincic will referee the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain on Sunday. This will be the last match of his career.
Vincic almost never came here and not for any reason related to the football pitch. On the night of 30 May 2020, police raided a farm outside Bijeljina in Bosnia as part of an operation against an alleged prostitution and drug-trafficking ring. They detained 35 people. Among them was Vincic, who says he was in town on business and accepted what he thought was an invitation to lunch.
“I found this farm by chance,” he later told Slovenian television. “I accepted the lunch invitation, which turned out to be my biggest mistake. I have nothing to do with the group that was arrested and detained, nor are my business partners.”
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Police seized cocaine, ten pistols, body armor and more than ten thousand euros in cash. A year later Tijana Maksimovic, who was identified by investigators as the organizer of the operation, pleaded guilty to charges of international solicitation for prostitution. Vincic was questioned as a witness and released without charge. He was never charged. Vlado Sajan, president of the Slovenian Football Referees Association, said at the time that Vincic did not suspect anything based on what the association had gathered “from official and unofficial sources and from Slavko himself”. The country where this happened is the same country his parents moved to Slovenia in the early 1970s.
He is 46 years old, from Maribor, son of an electrical engineer. He loved basketball first. In 2022, he told UEFA.com, “Basketball was my first love at the time, I played more than that. Football came second. He studied telecommunications engineering, got away from the game completely, then he felt something was missing. An uncle who was an assistant referee tried to enforce him. He was 20 years old. “And then, gradually, I began to believe in the star above,” he told the same outlet.
No one accused him of favoring the flag. But Argentina might reasonably wish for a different referee, if only for the company he keeps in their memory. Their only meeting with them was the 2022 World Cup opener in Qatar, when Saudi Arabia beat the reigning South American champions 2–1 in one of the biggest upsets of the tournament, Vincic disallowing three Argentina goals in the first half hour, one by Messi, two by Lautaro Martínez.
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Spain, in his experience, have fared better than that: four matches under his whistle, unbeaten in all of them, including the Euro 2024 semi-final in which Yamal and Olmo overcame an early French goal to send Luis de la Fuente’s side through to the final.
Vincic’s face went into his hands when he got the call from FIFA’s head of refereeing on Thursday. The Slovenian press that broadcast the video used the same word: solze. tears He also announced that this World Cup will be his last, as he will retire after Sunday. In a statement issued by FIFA, he said: “First of all shock. Then joy. I was shaking. To referee a World Cup final is every referee’s dream from the very beginning.”
“I take things step by step, adapt,” he told UEFA.com, “because too high expectations can sometimes lead to big disappointments.”