Experienced Kuipers has a reputation for letting matches flow and occasionally giving as good as he gets to players, and the 48-year-old was tested at times on Tuesday night as he oversaw Paris's tame Champions League semifinal exit at Manchester City.

A multi-millionaire through his ownership of a supermarket chain in his homeland, Kuipers held his own with some of the most valuable and most notoriously dramatic players in the world – and two have now accused him of dropping the f-bomb on them.