To each their job

But where does that leave leadership?

Fifa is continuing to do damage to its own reputation.

Here is the situation, for those not following the World Cup closely. The US Men’s National Team made it to the round of 32 and faced Bosnia and Herzegovina, a matchup they were widely expected to win. Folarin Balogun, the US’s top scorer, opened the game with a goal in the first half. Early in the second half he went into a challenge for the ball against defender Tarik Muharemović and appeared to step on his ankle. The referee did not call a foul in real time. VAR asked for a review. On review, the referee judged that a foul had occurred and that it warranted a red card.

A red card carries an automatic one-game suspension. There is no appeal. This is intentional. Fifa’s own rules treat the suspension as an unappealable consequence of the referee’s decision, precisely so that no team can litigate its way out of a sending-off. The US would face Belgium in the round of 16 without their best finisher.

At least one independent referee-analyst, reviewing the play afterward, called it not a red-card offense, an accidental collision of two players competing for the ball rather than a deliberate act. Reasonable people can disagree about how clear that consensus is. What is not in dispute is what happened next.

United States Soccer pushed to get the suspension lifted. President Trump called Fifa president Gianni Infantino directly and asked him to review the decision. Days later, Fifa suspended the suspension, citing Article 27 of its own disciplinary code, the provision that lets the disciplinary committee defer a sanction on probation. Balogun played against Belgium. Trump thanked Fifa publicly for “reversing a great injustice.” Belgium’s federation called the decision astonishing and pointed out that it directly contradicted Fifa’s own World Cup regulations. UEFA criticized it too.

This was not the first time. Fifa had already deferred the back end of a three-match ban for Cristiano Ronaldo after a red card in World Cup qualifying, letting him play in the group stage. It did the same for Argentina’s Nicolás Otamendi and Ecuador’s Moisés Caicedo. Rules that are final for some players turn out to be negotiable for others. The pattern is not new. It was simply more visible this time, because the negotiation ran through a head of state.

Everyone’s job

Start with the players. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s players wanted the card and got it. Playing a man up for the better part of a half is an advantage, and no competitor in their position would have refused it. The USMNT and its supporters were outraged, and pushed immediately to get the suspension overturned. Both reactions are exactly what competitors are supposed to do. Competing means training harder, playing smarter, and testing every rule to see what you can get away with. Lobbying a governing body, even lobbying it through the White House, is a version of that same instinct, just with more leverage behind it.

Fifa’s job is different. Fifa does not compete. Fifa referees. Its job is to make sure everyone plays by the same rules and is bound by them in the same way, win or lose, popular or unpopular, powerful or not. When USSF pushed for a reversal, it was doing its job. When Fifa granted one, it failed its job, not because the red card was correct, but because the finality of the sanction was the point.

Why finality matters more than being right

That claim needs defending, because it is not obvious. If the call was wrong, why is upholding it good?

Because the alternative is not “correct calls get fixed and everything else stays the same.” The alternative is a system where the sanction is only as final as your ability to get someone powerful to ask for a review. Fifa does not have a transparent appeals process that any team can invoke on the merits. It has a discretionary one, exercised case by case, with no visible standard for who qualifies. That is a different thing from correcting an error. Correcting an error means applying a rule that says: mistakes of this kind get reviewed, here is the process, anyone can use it. What happened here was not that. It was an exception granted to the team that could produce a call from a head of state, unavailable to Bosnia and Herzegovina, unavailable to most of the field. A rule that bends only under the right pressure is not more just than a rigid one. It is just less predictable about whose interests it will serve.

This is also the honest answer to the more sympathetic version of the counterargument, that rigid proceduralism is itself a problem, and that a flexible, humane willingness to revisit a bad call is better than blind deference to a mistaken referee. That would be a fair point if the flexibility were a rule applied evenly. It is not. Fifa has now shown that the same red card is final for a team without the right phone numbers and negotiable for a team with them. That is not compassion. It is selective enforcement, and selective enforcement is worse than a rigid rule applied badly, because at least a rigid rule fails everyone the same way.

The part that is not really about football

It would be naive to pretend that money, politics, and influence are not already threaded through World Cup football and Fifa as its governing body. But naming that reality is not the same as excusing it. Every organization has a version of this same split: someone whose job is to push for advantage, and someone whose job is to hold the line regardless of who is pushing. The whole arrangement depends on that second role staying uncorrupted by the first. Fifa did not just make an unpopular call. It revealed that its own enforcement was never fully insulated from exactly the kind of pressure it is supposed to exist to resist.

Sports is supposed to be one of the few remaining arenas where the result is a function of skill, preparation, and a bit of luck, not of who you know. That is worth protecting, and it does not protect itself. Protecting it is not a job description anyone signs up for. It is a responsibility that has to be chosen, repeatedly, by everyone who has power inside the system, especially the people running it, especially when choosing it costs something.

Everyone in this story did their job. The players competed. USSF advocated. Fifa held a meeting and cited a rule. But Fifa, and Fifa alone, failed the part of its job that holds it responsible for protecting the values of the game. When everyone is pushing for their own side, only Fifa can hold the line. That means looking past a single team’s grievance. It means remembering there is something bigger at stake.

The missed leadership opportunity

When institutional fail-safes fail, it creates an opening for individuals to step up, recognize the failure, and provide leadership outside their prescribed role, in service of the bigger issue. Several actors in this saga could have done that. Only two could reasonably have been expected to.

Anyone inside USSF could have decided not to appeal, but that is too tall an ask when their self-interest ran directly opposite to it. The USMNT’s coach could have chosen not to play Balogun even after the suspension was suspended, but beyond violating his own self-interest, that decision would have put him squarely in the line of fire had the US lost. Also too tall an ask.

That leaves two people with a genuinely broader vantage point than the USMNT or even USSF.

Start with Trump. As president, some bias toward the American team is understandable. But he is also a leader on the world stage, representing one of the most powerful democracies on earth and one of three hosts of this World Cup. It is not unreasonable to expect a president to understand the value of keeping politics and sport separate, and to protect that separation, if not actively, then at least by declining to get involved. Instead, he called Infantino directly, and then publicly took credit for the reversal. The call itself was a missed opportunity. Publicizing it closed the door on the alternative entirely: he could have given Fifa cover to quietly decline by never making the ask, or at minimum by making it privately and letting Fifa own the answer either way.

Then there is Infantino, who had to take that call and hear the request. As Fifa’s ultimate decision-maker, he had the chance to explain not just the rule, but the reason for it: that he had the discretion to grant the exception, and was choosing not to.

That was made harder by Fifa’s own history, including the precedents set earlier in this very World Cup. And that is the real issue. Fifa has failed this test before. Each time it does, it invites the exact behavior that keeps testing it again. USSF and Trump pushed because they knew, from recent precedent, that the right pressure could produce an exception. So they pushed. And once they pushed, Fifa could not simply say no, rules are rules, no exceptions, because it had already shown that was not true. A negotiation was the predictable result.

Leadership is not something reserved for the big, visible moments. It has to be considered in every decision, or it is not really there when it is needed. USSF could appeal to Trump because they understood he would prioritize American interests narrowly rather than act as a world leader might be expected to. USSF and Trump could appeal to Infantino because of what Fifa had already conceded, twice, earlier in this same tournament. No one expected leadership. No one supplied it. What followed was exactly what that absence predicts.