The US government’s contempt for the international rule of law now even extends to the world of football.
At the very beginning of this edition of the FIFA World Cup, we asked how much damage the Trump administration could do to the world’s biggest sports event. The best available answer, it seems, is the old classic: how long is a piece of string? There are, after all, still just under two weeks left of the tournament to play and the damage inflicted is already significant. Some of it may be irreversible.
So far, US authorities, with the blessing of FIFA, have barred the Iranian national team from staying overnight on US soil on their match days, putting the side at an enormous disadvantage to its rivals. The Iranian team went out in the final game of the group stages after having a contentious last-minute goal disallowed for offside. It has also refused entry to a Somali referee as well as untold numbers of football fans.
A couple of weeks ago, we posted a piece warning of the creeping Americanisation of world football, which has been going on for well over a decade but is rapidly accelerating during this edition of the World Cup.
The “beautiful game” has undergone sweeping changes, most of them unwelcome, mostly in the name of profit maximization, since this World Cup began. That this is occurring during a tournament hosted primarily by the US, where money does ALL the talking, is no coincidence.
The three-minute
commercialcooling breaks that occur at the 22nd and 67th minute of every half in the 2026 World Cup regardless of meteorological conditions represent a radical reconfiguration of the way the game is played, and one that has left most football coaches, players and fans severely unimpressed.
Interestingly, Diego Maradona warned of this very outcome back in 2018. When FIFA made it official that the 2026 World Cup would be played in the United States, Mexico and Canada, Maradona said in an interview with the journalist Victor Hugo Morales:
«The Americans wanted to make four halves of 25 minutes because of the publicity. We would have to play 100 minutes.”
The reason why FIFA is bending over backwards to accommodate the Trump administration’s every whim is pretty obvious: the organisation’s money-grubbing leadership is desperate to conquer the world’s biggest consumer market for itself and its biggest constituency, global corporations. And it it willing to do just about anything to achieve that, including awarding Trump a Mickey Mouse peace prize.
FIFA even bent its own rules to award the US the co-hosting rights for this year’s World Cup. In 2017, a year before the US, Mexico and Canada were chosen as co-hosts, Infantino warned that the first Trump administration’s travel bans, which then applied to six countries and now apply to 19, were incompatible with FIFA tournament regulations:
“Teams who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup. That is obvious.”
Over the past weekend, however, the Trump administration went where no other World Cup host has gone, at least in recent decades, by demanding that FIFA overturn a one-match suspension for Folarin Balogun, a key player on the US team, following his red card in the round of 32 game against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Said red card was for this dangerous challenge, which Trump claims was not even a foul:
It was US Secretary of State Marco Rubio who first publicly called for the punishment to be revoked. No great surprise there. Two sources familiar with the case confirmed to AFP that President Trump himself had called FIFA chief Gianni Infantino to ask him to review the automatic one-match ban. Which is exactly what FIFA did, though Infantino claims the decision was reached in a fully independent manner.
“Yes, I regularly discuss matters related to the FIFA World Cup with the President of the United States, and on this matter, I did receive a call from President Donald Trump, just as I receive calls from heads of state, government officials, football stakeholders and business executives from around the world on many different issues,” Infantino said.
“During our conversation, I explained that there was an ongoing legal process involving FIFA’s independent judicial bodies and that the case would be decided in due course by the competent bodies,” Infantino said. “That is how FIFA’s system works, and it is a principle that I will always uphold.”
Infantino’s claim was directly contradicted by Trump himself, who praised the FIFA president’s “brilliant” after the three phone conversations they had:
That was not a foul. It wasn’t even an infraction… It was two guys running full speed that happened to run into each other.”
“These were two great athletes that got tangled up and this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past… I don’t want to say that, because I don’t like to create controversy, but if you like I’ll provide you with his past… He made a call that nobody could believe.”
“They are not allowed to review in slow motion because it’s so different… Whereas, when you see it in ‘fast-motion’, it looked like two guys collided, which is exactly what happened.”
…
“It’s one thing to penalise someone for the game, but how do you penalise them for a game that hasn’t even been played yet? It’s very unfair. You can’t do that. So yes, I asked for a review by FIFA.”
At an event on Monday, Senator Ted Cruz even thanked Trump for getting rid of that “ridiculous red card”. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Trump administration should embrace outright cheating in a sporting event when Trump himself (allegedly) often cheats in golf, as Larry David insinuates in this hilarious take down of the 47th president of the US from his new sketch comedy series, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness:
The man who apparently led US efforts to overturn Balogun’s suspension was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, who was seen sitting next to Infantino during the US’ match against Bosnia and Herzegovina. As Anya Parampil points out below, Lutnik is a key member of the Epstein Class — the same Epstein class whose dodgy deal-making and repulsive racketeering is now the US’ governing philosophy, as Anand Giridharadas recently wrote in the New York Times.
The main takeaway from Monday’s events is that the US government’s contempt for the international rule of law now even extends to the world of football.
Belgian and European authorities were understandably up in arms about FIFA’s almost unprecedented reversal on Balogun’s suspension. Europe’s football governing body, UEFA, warned that FIFA had “crossed a red line” with its decision to bow to the wishes of Donald Trump and suspend the implementation of Balogun’s one-match suspension by a year.
From The Guardian:
In an unprecedented intervention in the middle of a tournament, Uefa accused Fifa of crossing “a red line” by making an “incomprehensible and unjustifiable” decision to rescind Balogun’s automatic one-match ban, which it claimed undermined “the integrity of the game and the credibility of the competition”.
As reported by the Guardian on Sunday, Trump repeatedly lobbied for Balogun’s suspension to be lifted, with sources disclosing that the US president made three calls to Fifa urging an intervention after the 25-year-old was sent off in the USA’s last-32 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina last Wednesday. The New York Times has reported that lawyers who have previously worked for Trump were engaged by US Soccer to challenge Fifa’s disciplinary regulations, with their correspondence said to invoke the rights of the United States as a nation and threaten a further appeal to the court of arbitration for sports (Cas).
Fifa had previously said that US Soccer had no right of appeal, but announced on Sunday that Balogun’s ban had been lifted for a 12-month probationary period, another unprecedented decision during a tournament which was explained by a brief reference to Article 27 of Fifa’s disciplinary code, which gives its judicial committee the authority to “fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure.”
In all fairness, FIFA crossed the red line a long, long time ago…
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Nick Corbishley 