By the way...

Citius, altius, fortius

Sometimes the referees have to show the red card early on.

(Bild: AP)

"Krone" columnist Harald Petermichl has looked into various records. And found out that you have to be pretty fast to set the record for a red card in soccer.

There are many ways to achieve a place in the relevant record lists. In athletics, for example, you can run particularly fast, jump high or far or wreak havoc on the carefully tended soccer pitch with strange objects that you throw out of a kind of predator's cage accompanied by the loudest possible screams. For some, however, this is too simple, such as the German triathlete Jonas Deichmann, who started competing in a long-distance triathlon 120 times a day at the beginning of May. Last Thursday, he delivered number 106 in the Franconian triathlon mecca of Roth and is now on his way to breaking the record with over 400 kilometers in the cool water, 19,000 on his bike and 4,473 on foot.

You can do that, but it's not entirely time-consuming, not to mention the almost 42,000 kilojoules that Deichmann has to consume in the form of food every day. Without a special holder to attach a generous extra portion of pasta to the bike, this would certainly be difficult. Of course, you can also make it easier for yourself, put less strain on your body in terms of both effort and food intake, and still appear at the top of a ranking, for example in the list of the fastest red cards in soccer. Peruvian Luis Advincula, who plays for the Argentinian capital club Boca Juniors, probably thought the same thing when, in a Copa Sudamericana match against Cruzeiro Belo Horizonte, he stepped on an opponent's articulatio talocruralis so violently after just nine seconds that he was sent off with a straight red card.

Walter Boyd holds the record for the fastest red card in soccer. It took him 0 seconds.

(Bild: Swansea City)

Not even the good Daniel Petrovic from SKN St. Pölten can keep up with him, who took more than twice as long in 2016, namely nineteen seconds, before the referee showed him the way to the showers after an emergency brake against Maximilian Entrup from Floridsdorfer AC. And yet the red card against Advincula is not the fastest in soccer history. Since 1999, this record will probably remain with Swansea City's Walter Boyd for all time and stands at zero seconds. Freshly substituted, he took the precaution of elbowing his Darlington FC opponent Martin Gray before the whistle had even blown to restart the game and was then able to finish his working day immediately. Let's hear it again, there are no records for eternity.