President Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss the red card given to Team USA’s Folarin Balogun during Wednesday night’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, an person familiar with the conversation told The Hill. Trump later cheered the reversal, calling it an “injustice.”
FIFA said its independent panel overturned the red card suspension for Monday’s game.
Whether the red card was bullshit or not it irrelevant. Sports fans everywhere know that shit calls get made. The issue is that a sitting president called up his buddy who happens to be the president of FIFA and had it overturned. That is fucking insane.
I feel like it would have been overturned regardless, as it was an egregiously bad call, but I agree that Trump should have plenty of better things to fill up his schedule with than calling up the FIFA president to complain about a red card in a game of footie. It’s a bad look, because now it looks like Trump had a hand in influencing the decision and the fairness and integrity of the game is called into question.
The thing is, FIFA put in rules that the Red could not be overturned. They removed the appeal process. What FIFA should have done was say there was a VAR protocol error (there actually was), which invalidates the procedure to give the Red. They didn’t take that easy out. Instead they make it completely obvious that this was corruption and not a mistake.