In the opening minute at Rams Park, Atakan Karazor arrived late on Mario Lemina and caught him on the ankle. The referee reached for yellow. Plenty of neutral observers watching that challenge thought red was the right call, and that's a fair thing to be annoyed about.
Karazor plays for Stuttgart, though. Whatever you want to call the referee's leniency there, it helped Stuttgart: it kept their midfielder on the pitch for the full ninety instead of playing the back half a man light. The one incident people point to as proof of bad officiating actually worked in Stuttgart's favor.
Look at what happened on the pitch instead. Stuttgart were missing two key midfield pieces, Angelo Stiller and Leo Sauer, both ruled out through injury before kickoff. That's a real blow, Stiller especially given how heavily he'd been leaned on for ball progression this season. Even shorthanded, Stuttgart out-shot Galatasaray on target and, per the official numbers, posted the better expected-goals figure in the match: 1.77 to Galatasaray's 1.01. Aleksey Batrakov scored both Galatasaray goals inside a three-minute spell in the first half, and from that point on Stuttgart did almost everything you'd want from a team chasing a game except score.
Leweling rattled the frame of the goal twice in the same attack inside the opening ten minutes. Undav and Führich both forced saves out of Uğurcan Çakır in the second half, and Pejcinovic, on as a substitute, had a late effort denied by a goalkeeper who had to fly off his line to stop it. That's four or five genuinely clear sightings of goal, against a keeper who had to be excellent to keep his team ahead. A team that creates that many clean looks and finishes none of them has only itself to blame. The referee was twenty yards away in minute one and had nothing to do with it.
There was a separate flashpoint later in the first half, a confrontation that left Batrakov needing treatment for a head injury and produced cards on both sides. That's a real moment of the referee losing his grip on the temperature of the game for a few minutes, and it's a fair gripe about game management. None of it explains the scoreline. Nobody was sent off, and nobody missed the rest of the match. Stuttgart kept generating chances well into the second half with all eleven men on the pitch.
This was Stuttgart's first defeat of this Champions League campaign after an unbeaten start through the opening matchdays, which makes it tempting to go hunting for an outside villain. Stuttgart had the chances to win this game themselves. Leweling hit the woodwork when the goal was gaping. Führich and Undav had the goalkeeper beaten in body position and still found his hands. Blaming Karazor's yellow card for that gives Stuttgart's finishing a pass it didn't earn. The referee let one of their own players off easy, and Stuttgart still couldn't make Galatasaray pay for it. That's on the players who had the ball in the right places and nowhere else.
