I have been contributing to the Bylines network for a while now, concentrating my writing on politics and the environment.
Despite my lifelong passion for football, I never thought for one moment that I would be writing about this subject matter. However, Trump’s red card intervention changed my viewpoint.
I have always followed England at major international championships; I am old enough to have been able to watch England’s World Cup winning victory against West Germany.
Then came the politics
This year’s competition taking place in the USA, Canada and Mexico, was meant to be a welcome time-out from the conflicts, challenges and prevailing threats that are all too commonplace in our troubled world these days.
That all changed with Donald Trump’s clumsy and totally inappropriate intervention. For the uninitiated, he phoned Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, requesting that the American player Balogun’s automatic one-game ban resulting from his red card in the previous game against Bosnia-Herzegovina, be suspended.
Clearly, Trump’s reach on the world stage isn’t just confined to politics. FIFA responded by suspending the player’s ban for a year, enabling him to be miraculously reinstated into the USA team for their last 16 tie against Belgium.
Infantino now has the unenviable reputation of joining many in the Republican Party who are now identified as enablers for this highly controversial and divisive President.
Upholding the rules
Here’s the thing: the rulebook of any organisation, whether the local bowls club or FIFA, has been written with the premise that there is universal understanding and adherence to it by the membership, without exception.
There should be no room for any misunderstanding: the integrity of the rules should be beyond reproach, with robust sanctions applied if they are broken. In this case, a suspension from the next game for Balogun was the defined punishment for his sending off against Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Every one of the 48 countries that started this 2026 tournament understood the fundamental sanction that would be applied if any player was sent off.
There was clarity and no ambiguity. That was until Trump’s grubby intervention. The rules aren’t worth the paper they are written on if an outsider, no matter how important that individual is, can undermine the integrity of FIFA’s rulebook as brazenly as Trump has done.
Counterproductive
The irony of this whole shabby affair is that it just fired up the Belgian team, the antithesis of Trump’s intention when he brazenly made his calls to Infantino. Belgium beat the USA 4-1!
This is just another high-profile example of how powerful people have curried favour with this president. Bullies thrive when people don’t stand up to them, and in this case, FIFA and the World Cup are so much the poorer for this acquiescence by Infantino.
Rules are made so that they are enforced, not broken as they have been in this sorry spectacle.
While Trump moves on to other opportunities, FIFA and the World Cup are left to pick up the pieces – something that simply would have been unnecessary if Infantino had done his job in the first place.
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