Stéphanie Frappart

Stéphanie Frappart grew up in Herblay, north-west of Paris, and started refereeing at 13 because she wanted to stay involved in football and was not going to make it as a player. She spent years working up through the men's amateur leagues, where a young woman with a whistle was a novelty and sometimes a target. She has said she dealt with it by being better prepared than everyone else on the pitch.

In 2014 she was appointed to Ligue 2, the second tier of French professional football, the first woman to referee at that level. Five years later she took charge of her first Ligue 1 match. That same summer she refereed the Women's World Cup final in Lyon, and a few weeks afterwards UEFA gave her the Super Cup between Liverpool and Chelsea in Istanbul, the first woman to referee a major men's European final. In December 2020 she became the first woman to referee a men's Champions League match, Juventus against Dynamo Kyiv.

At the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 she was one of three women appointed as match officials. On 1 December she refereed Costa Rica against Germany, with two women as her assistants, the first time a woman had taken charge of a men's World Cup match.

She has said she is not there to make a point, only to referee well enough that nobody notices her.