Signing you in

Vincic very nearly never got here at all, and not for any reason to do with a 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 had travelled to the town on business and accepted what he understood to be a lunch invitation.

“I found myself on this ranch by chance,” he told Slovenian television afterwards. “I accepted an invitation to lunch, which turned out to be my biggest mistake. I have nothing to do with the group that was arrested and detained, nor do my business partners.”

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Police seized cocaine, ten pistols, body armour, and more than ten thousand euros in cash. A year later Tijana Maksimovic, identified by investigators as the operation’s organiser, pleaded guilty to a charge of international enticement to prostitution. Vincic was questioned as a witness and released without charge. No charges were ever filed against him. Vlado Sajn, president of the Slovenian Football Referees Association, said at the time that Vincic was not suspected of anything, based on what the association had gathered “from official and unofficial sources and from Slavko himself.” The country where it happened is the same one his parents left for Slovenia in the early 1970s.

He is 46, from Maribor, the son of an electrical engineer. Basketball was what he loved first. “Basketball was my first love at the time, I played more of that,” he told UEFA.com in 2022. Football came second. He studied telecommunications engineering, drifted away from sport entirely, then felt something missing. An uncle who was an assistant referee suggested he try officiating. He was 20. “And then, slowly, I began to believe in my star above,” he told the same outlet.

Nobody has accused him of favouring a flag. But Argentina might reasonably wish for a different referee, if only for the company he keeps in their memory. His only previous 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 tournament’s great upsets, Vincic waving away three Argentine goals for offside inside the first half hour, one of them Messi’s, two of them Lautaro Martinez’s.

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Spain, in his experience, has fared rather better: four matches under his whistle, unbeaten in all of them, including the Euro 2024 semi-final in which Yamal and Olmo overturned an early French goal to send Luis de la Fuente’s side to the final they would go on to win.

“I take things step by step, match by match,” he told UEFA.com, “because too many great expectations can sometimes lead to great disappointments.”