PAOK & Refs

In the 29th minute, Colombo missed Fabiano's handball live and waved play on for a corner — VAR disagreed, sent him to the monitor, and the penalty was correctly given (scored by Ndiaye). In the 37th minute, Taison's shot struck Fabiano's raised arm again and deflected out of play; this time neither Colombo nor VAR saw it, so no second penalty was given. Referee analysts Aristomenis Koutsiaftis and Varouchas both said the 37th-minute handball should also have been a penalty — the arm was held away from the body in an unnatural position on both occasions — and both dismissed Aris's own penalty appeal from the same passage of play as a fair contest for the ball, not a foul.

Zafeiris's late, studs-up tackle on Aris's Račić, stamping his ankle from behind, was only booked with a yellow card. Varouchas said it should have been a straight red; former referee Kostas Akridas, in his Master REF column, put it a little more cautiously — rating Colombo 7.6/10 overall and saying he "made several errors in disciplinary control" and could have sent a PAOK player off with a second yellow.

Separately: the referee appointed to the match, 35-year-old Colombo, had been named days earlier in Italian press reports as one of the officials under investigation by Milan prosecutors over alleged manipulation of referee appointments (the "Calciopolis 2.0" case) — a case that also saw Italian refereeing chief Gianluca Rocchi suspended pending sporting-fraud charges. No link between that investigation and his performance in this match has been established; it is noted here only as pre-match context that was public before kickoff.

In the 34th minute, with the score 1–0 to Panathinaikos, Van Drongelen fouled Ndiaye inside the box; Zwayer waved play on and awarded a corner instead of a penalty — a corner former referee Kostas Akridas said shouldn't have existed either, since the ball had actually gone out off a PAOK player, not off Panathinaikos. A PAOK delegation later visited the VAR Center to review the referee–VAR audio: the VAR (Miller) had examined the incident using camera angles that did not include the broadcast replay clearly showing the foul, and closed the check as "no foul, corner" without ever seeing the decisive angle. The refereeing committee, headed by Stéphane Lannoy, acknowledged the error after the review, concluding the penalty should have been given — a position later reported independently by outlets covering the opposing side as well, corroborating PAOK's account of the incident. A separate account attributed to KEΔ insiders offered a different explanation for VAR's silence: the review window was reportedly too brief to catch the foul, rather than a camera-angle problem.

Referee analyst Eleni Lampadariou made a similar case the day after the match: she said Zwayer had actually erred twice on the same passage of play — first missing a foul in Kangwa's favor just before the marking that led to the penalty protests, and then, having let the phase continue instead of stopping it there, failing to review the Ndiaye challenge when VAR should have called him to the monitor. Akridas rated Zwayer 7.6/10 for the match overall, calling it a "double error" on the same phase.

For balance: PAOK also had a player sent off in this match — Elustondo received a correctly-awarded red card in the 14th minute for bringing down Tetteh, who was clean through on goal — and conceded a penalty (44') for a Bataoulas handball, which Akridas rated as correctly given. Neither is logged as an error.