Denmark's Peter Rasmussen has decided to immediately quit the international refereeing stage having been a UEFA Elite Development Group member, the second highest referee group within the European football governing body, for nearly two years.
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| Peter Rasmussen (DEN, 3rd l.) has left the FIFA list (c) Sportsuptodate |
In compliance with an article published at Denmark's football federation DBU's official website, 1975 born Rasmussen exposed the incoherency of job, family and refereeing as the basic reason for his international retirement, which has been an idea for a year, as he stated. Thus, he was not able to completely fulfill UEFA's and FIFA's requirements. As a consequence, he found himself unable to cope with the pressure arousing from the various parts of his life.
Having received threats and having faced heavy medial attention after a non-given penalty in his last UEFA Champions League match between Manchester City and Ajax Amsterdam at the end of 2012 (the penalty would have been in favour of Man.City in the last minute of stoppage time), he denied himself to any further national or international match for several months. He admitted that this incident also fired his decision to leave FIFA refereeing.
Seasoned UEFA referee observer and the chief of DBU's Elite Referee Group Kaj Østergaard expressed his regret concerning Rasmussen's decision, while he stressed that he was "pleased that Peter [had] still the motivation to handle matches on national level, partly because he helped to ensure a high quality of tournaments and because he [was] a role model for younger referee colleagues".
Rasmussen became an international FIFA referee in 2006, followed by the participation in UEFA's CORE Programme in 2007. His biggest international achievements comprise two matches at UEFA U-21 EURO 2009 Sweden and a couple of Champions League (3) and Europa League (13) matches. He became the first official who conducted a test of the recently established hawk-eye system (Goalline Technology, GLT) when refereeing the friendly match between England and Belgium at Wembley Stadium in June 2012.
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