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The Day Trump and the Epstein Class Nearly Broke the FIFA World Cup

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“In the eyes of the world, no matter what happens, every goal, every game [the US] wins, maybe tonight and afterwards, will have a stigma attached.”

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 two weeks left of the tournament to play.

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 commercial cooling 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 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”.

The man who apparently led US efforts to overturn Balogun’s suspension was none other than Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, who, as Anya Parampil points out below, is a prominent 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.

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, as The Guardian’s Marina Hyde points out:

A red line? A red line?! Call me cartography-obsessed, but I feel like we crossed that line a few moral galaxies ago. Maybe when Infantino was butching it out in the photocall at Trump’s Gaza Peace Summit For Ghoulishly Rapacious Businessmen (not its official title). Certainly when Gianni inaugurated the auto-satirical Fifa peace prize and awarded it to Trump just a couple of months before the president decided to truly live according to its values and launch a war on Iran.

The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) was even more miffed at FIFA’s decision, with national team manager Rudi Garcia likening it to an April Fools’ Day joke.

Weirdly, Trump and his MAGA supporters are not the only ones in the US who support the suspension of Balogun’s one-match match ban. Even prominent anti-Trumpers like Cenk Ugyur are treating the decision as if it is the only fair option available, rather than what it actually is: the government of the host country rigging the governing processes of world football’s governing body.

Meanwhile, FOX News hosts even suggested that Trump should use a display of force by the US military to intimidate the US’ Belgian opponents.

The good news is that Trump’s intervention in the World Cup has backfired massively. Not only did Team USA lose to Belgium despite having their best player on the pitch, they were mercilessly thrashed 4-1. Worse still, the second and fourth goals were a result of slapstick incompetence on the part of Team USA’s goalkeeper, Matt Freese, who, rather ironically, froze mid-action for the second goal, and defenders.

Even more important, Trump’s intervention has placed huge pressure on FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who now faces calls from around the world for him to resign.

Predictably, there have been some pretty good memes along the way…

Even the scandal-tarnished former FIFA President Sepp Blatter launched a blistering attack against his successor, arguing that “football must never become a playground for political power”, which is a bit rich: football has always been a playground for political power.

One need only recall how Russia was banned from competing in both UEFA and FIFA competitions within just days of the launch of its Special Military Operation in Ukraine. By contrast, Israel continues to compete in all tournaments despite waging wars on multiple fronts and committing a genocide in Gaza and Southern Lebanon.

But overt political interference in World Cup matches by the host country has not been seen for decades. Perhaps most famously, Mussolini exerted direct pressure on FIFA referees and officials during the 1934 World Cup, held in Italy and eventually won by Italy, as the Spanish historian Nacho Montes de Oca recounts in a twitter thread (machine translation):

During the 1934 World Cup, held in Italy, Benito Mussolini personally intervened in the choice of the referees who would officiate the matches of the Italian national team. According to the chronicles of the time, the dictator dined formally with them the night before the meetings to make it clear what was expected of their performance.

In the quarter-final match against Spain, Belgian referee Louis Baert allowed wild play by the Italians, especially against the leading Spanish figures. Goalkeeper Ricardo Zamora ended up with broken ribs. In the subsequent tiebreaker, referee René Mercet disallowed two legitimate goals to Spain; his performance was so questioned that the Swiss Federation itself ended up suspending him for life.

In the semi-final against Austria, referee Ivan Eklind validated an Italian goal in a play in which several players pushed the Austrian goalkeeper into the net. Minutes later, the same referee intercepted with his head a pass that could lead to a clear counterattack by Austria. After that match, Mussolini again appointed Eklind to direct the final against Czechoslovakia.

The most controversial play of the final occurred when Luis Monti brought down Czech striker Oldřich Nejedlý inside the Italian area. The foul seemed like an obvious penalty, but Eklind ignored it and let the game continue. Before the starting whistle, the referee stood in front of the presidential box and made the fascist salute addressed to Benito Mussolini. Italy won the match 4-2.

I don’t know why this series of data came to mind on a subject that is not mine, as is the case of sports.

In other words, Trump is in august company. The last time FIFA refused to impose a suspension on a player during a World Cup was in Brazil 1962, when Brazilian legend Mané Garrincha was sent off in the dying minutes of Brazil’s 4-2 semi-final win against Chile. That should have ruled him out of participating in the final but FIFA ended up letting him off.

One major difference between now and then is that today a red card gets you an automatic ban of at least one-match — unless, of course, your president is Donald J Trump. As the British-American broadcaster Roger Bennett notes in the interview below with CBS, FIFA’s decision to overturn Balogun’s red card has “destroy[ed] the integrity of the competition”:

The money quote:

The crazy thing is the US team has been doing so well. Our boys have been doing us proud… without any of this interference. And now, in the eyes of the world, no matter what happens, every goal, every game they win, maybe tonight and afterwards, will have a stigma attached, will have an asterisk.

This, by the way, will last beyond the World Cup for both the team and this poor player, Balogun, who is a great young striker. When you mention his name in 10 years, no matter how many goals he scores or how many games he plays, the world will only remember him for “Bolugate”

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world is enjoying a brief moment of much-deserved schadenfreude at the US’s humiliating exit. They include Explosive Media, the company behind the pro-Iran Lego-style AI videos.

This cathartic moment is unlikely to last long for international football fans, however, with both Trump and Infantino free to continue poisoning the tournament they are co-hosting.

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5 comments

  1. NN Cassandra

    Well, the football Gods cleared their throats and ensured US lose four to one. I wonder how Infantino is going to overturn that.

    Reply ↓
  2. Yushan

    Normally I would have been indifferent to who wins (“may the best team win”), but this time I was really cheering the Belgian team and thought it was fantastic to see them humiliate the USA with 4-1!!!
    The Belgians said after the match that they were extra energised because of the injustice.

    I do feel bad for the US team though, and especially Folarin Balogun. It is not their fault that they got caught up in this affair, and the whole affair may have contributed to their bad performance on the field. They are victims of a mad president and a corrupt FIFA. I read that Balogun went to the Belgian team after the match to talk about it. Of course the Belgians told him that it was not his fault and nobody blames him for the affair. No bad blood.

    Now I want the scalp of Infantino.

    Reply ↓
  3. Carolinian

    They say Donny also cheats at golf. As Mel Brooks says in History of the World: “it’s good to be the king.”

    Reply ↓
  5. The Rev Kev

    I was listening to a reporter from the White House press pool and the guy was saying that Infantino is a regular visitor to the White house and whenever he turns up, he bring Donny a present. That is beyond compromised but the American take over of FIFA dates back to when Obama was President. But not only was the US defeated but so was Mexico and Canada meaning all three co-hosts are out of the series. Belgium has a reputation the past few games of being very slow starters for the first half of the game meaning that they have to play catch up in the second half. This time they were all fired up and came roaring out of the starting block and were simply the better team on the day.

    Reply ↓

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