In a new episode of “Los otros de Movistar” on the Vamos TV channel, former Spanish FIFA World Cup referee Antonio Lopez Nieto remembers details of an attempted bribery that occurred before the UEFA Champions League Group A match between Dynamo Kiev and Panathinaikos, played on 13 September 1995.
"The hosts told us 'Hey, we are going to the city to see some gift shops, so maybe you should give yourself a sauna'. I said 'no, look, I don't want to do sauna before a game, it's not good for the muscles. The sauna that they offered me was a different ‘sauna’, of course ”, says the former Spanish referee in his story. Lopez Nieto says that they had given him a fur coat and then the referees were taken to dinner: “We were going in two Mercedes cars through the forest and they took us to a kind of villa. ‘This is the Dynamo Kiev headquarters’, they said, smiling. There was not a single club pennant and, suddenly, some girls were moving in a very provocative manner." Once inside a room, a person linked to the club brought him a piece of paper: "’Antonio, Dynamo victory, $30,000’, he said in Spanish. It made me want to give him a pounding. I told him ‘we are leaving'”. After that match, which ended with a 1-0 victory for Dynamo, Antonio Lopez Nieto, along with his assistants Chirino Rivera and Giraldez Carrasco, and the fourth official Prados Garcia, denounced the case. UEFA decided to exclude the Ukrainian team from the competition for two years and two senior managers of the club were suspended from football for life.
Later that same year, Lopez Nieto refereed the first of his three UEFA Cup finals (1995, 1998, 2000). At the 2002 FIFA World Cup, Lopez Nieto established a record of 14 yellow cards and 2 red cards in the match between Germany and Cameroon. This record was later broken in the 2006 World Cup by Valentin Ivanov during the match between Portugal and Netherlands, with 16 yellow cards and 4 red cards.
Source: Futbol en Movistar+
