A referee has gone viral for seemingly showing a player a red card on his phone – in an eerie experiment which could change football forever. 

Eduardo Varela has become the first referee in history to send a player off with a digital red card in a trial in a Copa Uruguay clash between Nacional and Rentistas.

And the smartphone-like device – which also displays yellow cards – logs every booking, substitution, goal, and penalty for the wider Uruguayan football system. 

That allows the administration to keep better track of statistics and, in due course, hopefully relay them to fans and the media whatever the level of match.

But the initiative has already come under scrutiny due to problems with visibility.

In one test match between Defensor Sporting and Plaza Colonia, the sunlight rendered it almost impossible to interpret the device from a distance, meaning the experiment had to be abandoned. 

Uruguay have been trialling digital cards which track and upload data from matches 

Referee Eduardo Varela became the first man to send somebody off digitally

The device is only in the trial stage but it has been an idea three years in the making. 

Developers REFe are exploring adding LED lighting around the device to make the colours clearer to spectators. 

Their ultimate ambition is for the technology to be adopted by South American ​governing body CONMEBOL and eventually FIFA. 

‘We have seen all kinds of comments, positive and negative. We ⁠have even ​laughed at the memes,’ said Mauro Sacco, director of REFe. 

‘The important thing is that ​people are talking about it. Any innovation takes time.’

Fellow director Diego de la Pena added: ‘It’s a project with room for improvement. It looked much better live than it did on TV. The challenge we face now is to improve ​it for the whole audience.

‘The ⁠yellow card has to be yellow, the red card has to be red, and it has to be visible to people at the ground and on ​television.’

For the most part, fans online have ridiculed the innovation.

‘It doesn’t generate any improvement to the game or to the spectator… not everything has to be digital,’ one fan wrote on X.

‘It’ll be a problem if the battery runs out,’ pointed out one supporter. 

Another wrote: ‘This is completely unnecessary and probably heavier to carry than two cards, a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist!’

One predicted: ‘The most unnecessary technological replacement in life, soon we’ll see brands on the cards, that’s for sure.’