“When I saw that the referee was a German-Swiss national, I thought it was peculiar. At half-time, he spoke only German with the Dortmund players,” Lille president Olivier Letang said, implying that the official contributed to his side’s elimination.
Yet Schärer knows what it’s like to be on the other side; after all, the 37-year-old was a player himself in his day and was even regarded as a “rebel”, as the Tagesanzeiger describes him. “I was a difficult one, really bad,” he says of himself.