A few years ago, Howard Webb and Bibiana Steinhaus starred in official matches at world football championships, now they assume they are married
The former referees of the World Cup and Champions League finals Howard Webb y Bibiana stone house They are delighted after revealing that they recently got married. The two elite officials, who have taken on the responsibility of playing top football matches and played five World Cups together, got married last month in Hanover, Germany, the birthplace of Steinhaus.
In what may have been a nod to his profession, Webb wore an all-black suit, while the refereeing world equivalent of Brangelina (Howiana? Bibward? Webbhaus?) Posed for their wedding photos.
It’s true. We got married during the last international holiday and we are very happyBibiana, who now uses the Steinhaus-Webb surnames, told the German newspaper image“Due to the regulations imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, we have unfortunately been able to take this important step on our own.”
They did not even allow witnesses before the marriage. And of course we haven’t been on a honeymoon yet
Webb, 49, is a former Premier League official who has played more than 500 top-level competitive matches throughout his career, including the Champions League Finals and the South African World Cup, both played in 2010. LThe World Cup final between the teams from the Netherlands and Spain was notorious for its high level of conflict.
Steinhaus has a similar resume and has performed at all levels of women’s football including a Champions League final, the 2011 Women’s World Cup final in Germany and the 2012 Summer Olympics gold medal match.
The 42-year-old official made history during the 2017-18 season by being the first referee to supervise a Bundesliga match for men. She was sometimes mistreated from the stands, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying an elite career in which she was named Female Referee of the Year by the German Football Association (DFB) seven times. Steinhaus retired in September 2020 after the performance of the German Super Cup match between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.
Howard and Bibiana served as police officers before becoming professional referees, and together they have overseen hundreds of matches since graduating in 1995 and 1999 respectively.
Webb performed 534 matches between 2000 and 2013, managing 1,694 yellow cards and 68 red cards. Later, however, he admitted that he felt “more than disappointed” because he had not expelled Nigel de Jong from school because the Dutch player Xabi Alonso had stomped in the first half of the 2010 World Cup final. Somehow De Jong managed to get away with it. And only be punished with a yellow card, despite nailing his studs to Alonso’s chest. Webb later recalled, however, that he failed to see the real impact of the raid because of its location on the field; therefore he felt that the action only deserved a warning.
According to FIFA, Steinhaus-Webb ended his career after whistling in 23 Bundesliga games, excluding 92 games in the German second division and 35 in the Bundesliga for women. where she made her collegiate debut. According to the statistics portal Soccerbase, the referee has administered 164 yellow cards and 3 red cards in men’s competitive matches played between 2015 and 2020.
The happy couple will at least live on both sides of the Atlantic for now: Webb currently lives in New York City, where he works as the general manager of the Major League Soccer Professional Referees Organization; while Steinhaus lives in Germany, where he works as a VAR officer at the DFB headquarters in Cologne. They clearly share an ardent passion for maintaining law and order on the football pitches and are made for each other.
While the news of the marriage of two professional referees is somewhat groundbreaking, it is not entirely unprecedented.
In 2019, the clash in the Romanian fourth division between the teams of CA Oradea and CS Diosig got off to an unusually romantic start, when one of the referees who worked on the field made a different proposal.
In the preliminary match, assistant referee Marius Matica knelt down and asked the question to his girlfriend Gyorgi Duma, who was coaching on the other side.
Spoiler alert: she said “yes”.
ESPN Germany correspondent Stephan Uersfeld contributed to this note