Vítor Manuel Melo Pereira (born 21 April 1957) is a retired

football (soccer) Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

referee from

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

, best known for supervising four matches at the

FIFA World Cup The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of the ' ( FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The tournament ha ...

: two in

1998 1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''. Events January * January 6 – The ''Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently s ...

and 2002. Since August 2017 he was the head of Greek refereeing appointed directly by FIFA. On 23 September 2021, he was hired by the Russian Football Union to head their refereeing department, replacing

Viktor Kassai Viktor Kassai (''Kassai Viktor'', Hungarian pronunciation: ; born 10 September 1975) is a Hungarian football official and a former referee who is the current head of refereeing department of the Bulgarian Football Union. He participated in the ...

. On 15 March 2022, he resigned from the RFU position.

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Profile
1957 births Portuguese football referees FIFA World Cup referees Sportspeople from Lisbon Living people UEFA Champions League referees 1998 FIFA World Cup referees 2002 FIFA World Cup referees UEFA Euro 2000 referees {{Portugal-footy-bio-stub