Two decades after joining a refereeing course at 16, this Singaporean will officiate at the World Cup

SINGAPORE: A work meeting in May was interrupted to break the news to 36-year-old Muhammad Taqi Aljaafari Jahari.

He had been selected as one of the 129 match officials for World Cup 2022. And there were tears.

"It was very, very emotional. I was overjoyed with tears … Honestly, I didn't expect this appointment and coming from a country like Singapore, where we are from a tiny nation on the world map," he recalled.

"This is something that I really hoped for. I really worked hard for it ... Your role can be a referee, can be an assistant referee or can be a VAR referee or even can be a reserve referee. But every role that is being assigned in the World Cup, it reflects on the tremendous, hard work that you have done in the past years." 

And for Taqi, who will be one of the 24 match officials operating the video assistant referee (VAR) system at the tournament, it was a journey which began when he was just 16.

As a youngster, Taqi honed his football skills at the void deck with friends but he eventually joined the hockey team as there was no football co-curricular activity offered in his school.

"Football was just a pastime for us, because we had an interest in football. And we just played football socially among my schoolmates," he said.

He would be eventually roped into one of the Football Association of Singapore's refereeing courses by two of his schoolmates, who had family members officiating matches in the local amateur leagues.

"When we were playing football, we would talk about football and so ... they roped me in just to learn the laws of the game," he said.

"When I took up the course, it was to know more about the game. There wasn't any like so-called deep interest into refereeing, just learning the laws of the game and