The home of the beautiful game is also where soccer sometimes shows itself at its ugliest.
Brazil has given us some of the prettiest soccer we’ve ever seen and some of the sport’s most delightful players. But it’s also a place where fan violence still rears its ugly head regularly.
Brazil gave us the most horrific soccer story in recent memory. In June 2013, a 19-year-old player got injured in a pickup game and became the referee. When he ejected another player, who happened to be a friend, for a foul, they got into an argument. The ref stabbed the player twice, which wound up killing him. The crowd then lynched and dismembered the referee before putting his severed head on a stake.
On Tuesday morning, the soccer world was set abuzz by images of yet another shocking incident in Brazilian soccer. A referee brandished a gun after he got into an argument with a manager in an amateur league game. (The video below is from Fansided.)
The referee is believed to be a police officer who fetched his gun from the locker room, according to the Mirror.
It seems that the episode didn’t escalate further and the referee has been ordered to undergo a psychological assessment.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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