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FIFA had a chance to just say no, and it didn’t take it.
That’s the part getting lost before — and after — the U.S. men’s national team’s World Cup ended Monday night against Belgium with Folarin Balogun back in the lineup.
Balogun was sent off in last Wednesday’s win over Bosnia, and FIFA initially affirmed the suspension, meaning he’d miss the round of 16. Then, less than a day and a half before kickoff, the governing body reversed course and suspended the ban for a year. Belgium said it never got an explanation. And by Monday morning, reports from multiple outlets, including the New York Post, had the Trump administration directly involved in getting the decision overturned, right down to threats to pursue a global court challenge.
Trump confirmed it himself hours before the match, framing his intervention as a simple correction of a bad call while also noting that Balogun is one of the team’s best players. That’s not a throwaway line as much as it’s the entire controversy in one sentence. Nobody’s making late-night calls to FIFA’s president over Joe Scally (no offense), and the fact that it took a star player’s suspension to trigger this kind of pressure campaign is exactly why the reversal looks as bad as it does.
Trump on Balogun: “I saw the play, and I’m a person that loves sports … that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction … this referee, who is a little bit suspect if you check his past. He made a call that nobody could believe … he’s our best player, or one of our best… pic.twitter.com/YfIqb1JA4u
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 6, 2026
None of that makes FIFA a bystander here. The organization had the authority to simply uphold its own ruling and let the political pressure crash into a wall. Instead, it caved, and it caved on a timeline that made the optics as damaging as possible. The decision came down on Sunday, with games still being played on Friday and Saturday during the holiday weekend, leaving Belgium with barely more than a day to adjust its preparations for a completely different U.S. attack. If FIFA reverses this Thursday or Friday, the story is a governing body correcting an officiating mistake with enough runway for both sides to adjust. Instead, the timing collapsed into the White House’s press conference, and now nobody’s talking about the officiating anymore.
That’s the frustrating irony buried in all of this. Plenty of neutral soccer voices, including Fox Sports analyst Mark Clattenburg, said in real time that the red card shouldn’t have stood, that it was an overly literal freeze-frame reading of a collision, not a deliberate foul. If FIFA reaches that same conclusion on its own, on its own schedule, this isn’t a story about presidential influence peddling. It’s a story about a governing body admitting a mistake. FIFA had the cleaner path available and chose the murkier one, and it’s going to wear the consequences of that choice regardless of how the White House wants to spin its own involvement.
It’s also not as if FIFA’s credibility was pristine walking into this. Between World Cup hosting decisions, media rights deals, and years of governance controversies, plenty of people already assume the worst about how FIFA operates behind closed doors. That history is exactly why so much of the public reaction skipped past shock and went straight to jokes about corruption finally breaking America’s way. FIFA didn’t get the benefit of the doubt here because it hasn’t earned it, and Gianni Infantino’s own well-documented ties to Trump — including FIFA renting U.S. office space in a Trump-owned building — only reinforce why nobody’s treating this reversal as a coincidence.
Trump is going to move on to the next available headline. FIFA doesn’t get that luxury. It still has to govern the rest of this tournament, still has to explain itself to Belgium, and still has to answer for a decision it made with full knowledge of how it would look. The administration applied the pressure, sure. But FIFA is the one that picked up the phone, changed the ruling, and let the timing do the rest of the damage on its own.
And then Belgium won 4-1, and the whole fight over one red card stopped being about soccer at all.
It didn’t matter, and that’s the actual point. The entire case for FIFA’s involvement rested on the idea that the U.S.’s best player being available was worth bending the process for. Balogun went out and played like the team’s best player. The U.S. still lost by three goals. If this was ever genuinely about the result and not the optics of standing up for a player, this is the result that was supposed to prove it — and it didn’t. FIFA doesn’t get to say the reversal mattered on the field, because it didn’t change the outcome. All that’s left is the process itself: an organization that had the standing to uphold its own ruling chose not to, and did it in a way that made the politics impossible to separate from the sport.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.