Feyenoord fans want Simone Sozza's name in the headline after the 1-0 loss at Real Betis. Gjivai Zechiël's name belongs there instead.
Feyenoord's best player got the ball in a dangerous, close-range position in the first half and put it over the bar. Every credible account of the match, Dutch and otherwise, points to that moment as the clearest chance of the night. For a team that lost by a single goal, that miss is the story.
Then came the penalty. Abde Ezzalzouli's shot hit Jeremiah St. Juste's arm, Sozza pointed to the spot, and Isco buried it like a player with his pedigree is supposed to. Dutch coverage of the incident, including live reporting that called St. Juste's situation unlucky, landed on the same conclusion: the ball struck the arm, and the law doesn't care how unfair that feels. The referee made the call the rulebook asked him to make. It's a team that got unlucky and then didn't have the finishing to make the bad luck irrelevant.
There was a second shout, a waved-off penalty appeal from Givairo Read in the second half. Nobody who covered the match independently flags it as a clear error. A shout that gets waved off is just that.
Sozza arrived in Seville with a disciplinary record this season that reads like a man who enjoys reaching for his pocket, and he'd barely refereed at this level before kickoff. Argue he's not someone who should be trusted with a result like this if you want. But arguing he lacks credibility in general is a different claim from arguing he got this specific match wrong, and nothing in the record supports the second claim. Van Bronckhorst's gripe about the pitch at Estadio La Cartuja is a separate, legitimate complaint. It has nothing to do with who put the ball over the bar from close range.
Put this result next to what happened at Camp Nou earlier in the competition, where Feyenoord got taken apart by four goals. A single-goal defeat decided by a marginal penalty is a far less damning night than that one. Betis are unbeaten through three Champions League matches this season and have now beaten this Feyenoord side in both competitive meetings between the clubs over the last year. That's a side worth taking seriously. Blaming an Italian referee nobody outside the Eredivisie had heard of a week ago is easier than admitting it.
The instinct to blame the whistle is the easiest reflex in football, because it lets everyone look away from the only moment that genuinely cost Feyenoord the game. Zechiël had it in front of him and put it over the bar. That one belongs to him alone.
