Seeing Yellow

I love soccer. I've played soccer, coached soccer, and am a soccer referee. I love the World Cup. I love the fact that, theoretically, every country in the world has a chance to win it all. I love how four years of training, qualifying, sweating, bleeding, hurting, and dreaming comes down to one month, one group, one game, one champion. This is the best soccer the world has to offer.
Well, it’s almost the best the world has to offer. Unfortunately, one fatal flaw has become all too evident again this World Cup. It's the referees. Rumblings were heard four years ago in Korea/Japan. Now, in Germany, those rumblings have turned to peels of outrage and cries of horror. The absolute ineptitude of some of the FIFA referees at this world cup is enough to embarrass anyone who wears the referee patch. Like any other referee, I have some compassion for the refs. I mean, no matter what you think, the fact that these guys are officiating on the world's biggest stage cannot be ignored. Anyone would be susceptible to jitters, butterflies, and an occasional blown call. But what I have witnessed thus far goes well beyond this small grace allowance. These are supposed to be the best referees the world has to offer. Just the process of gaining a FIFA assignment, let alone a World Cup assignment, is nothing less than monumental. It takes years. Years of training, education, climbing your way up the "corporate ladder," doing game after game after game. So how is it that we are again witnessing matches being taken over and ruined by these "best of the best" referees? And I'm not talking just about the horrendous blown call during the USA--Ghana match. The sea of yellow cards, given out for seemingly any meaningless and harmless foul, has handcuffed teams looking to advance out of the group stage.
I blame FIFA. Their process for choosing referees for the tournament is obviously flawed. Sure, one, maybe two, referees will inevitably sneak in who have no business being there. And it is inevitable that one or two referees will have an "off" game. But the systematic and uniform trend of tight calls and an over-abundance of plastic yellow rectangles points to a fatal flaw that is bigger than any one referee is. It points to instruction by FIFA officials, in meetings and instructions given to the referees before the tournament even began, to manage the matches as they are. I can't believe that all these referees are that bad. Of course, since I have never come close to officiating a match of such importance and weight, I have no real idea what these guys are going through. But what I can say from experience is that politics have no place in choosing who will and will not referee a match. FIFA, please, we beg you, find the best officials possible. It doesn't matter if they are from Brazil, California, Moscow, Liverpool, Johannesburg, Tehran, or Bangkok. Just find the best refs in the world, and let them be a part of the best soccer in the world.