The Call Heard Around the World Cup

FIFA has spent years telling anyone who would listen that it changed its ways in regard to its corruption issues. Among their efforts include a new disciplinary code, “independent” judicial bodies, a governance overhaul built to bury the memory of the bribery scandals that put more than a dozen officials in the reach of U.S. prosecutors in 2015. Then, on a Sunday in July, a phone call from the President of the United States undid a good part of that work in a single news cycle.

Folarin Balogun, the United States’ leading scorer, was sent off after a VAR review for dragging his studs down the back of Bosnia and Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemovic’s leg and onto his ankle in the round of 32. The red card carried an automatic one-match ban that would have kept him out of the round of 16 against Belgium. This is a sanction that FIFA’s own officials had said could not be appealed. Days later, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee invoked the rarely used Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code to suspend the ban for a one-year probationary period, clearing Balogun to play. It was the first time since 1962 that FIFA had nullified the effect of a red-card suspension handed out during a World Cup.

The context of this reversal is what turned an obscure disciplinary footnote into an international story. President Donald Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to ask that the case be reviewed. This call was first surfaced by journalists and later confirmed by Trump himself, who said from the Oval Office, “I asked for a review…[I] didn’t think it was a foul.” When the ban was suspended, Trump posted on Truth Social thanking FIFA “for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice,” and the White House celebrated with a post reading “USA-USA-USA.” The news story wrote itself. The head of the host government picked up the phone, and days later the host nation’s best player was back on the field. These optics would raise the eyebrow of any person watching.

The Point Compliance Officers Should Take From This

Here is the main issue with what transpired, and it is narrower than most of the outrage suggests. The scandal is not that FIFA reached the wrong result. It may well have reached a defensible one as plenty of neutrals thought the red card was harsh, and U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino was not alone in saying so. The scandal is that FIFA’s own defense of the decision is now impossible to test. And a decision that cannot be tested is a governance failure regardless of whether it happened to be correct.

That is the part worth contemplating because it inverts how most people instinctively judge these things. The usual question is: Was the outcome fair? The compliance question is: Could an interested party ever prove the outcome was free from undue influence? After a documented call from a head of state, the honest answer for FIFA is clearly no. Infantino’s own statement makes the trap visible. He confirmed the call, then insisted that “FIFA’s judicial bodies are independent” and “operate autonomously, apply the FIFA Disciplinary Code, and decide cases based on the applicable regulations and the specific facts before them.” He added that he had merely explained “there was an ongoing legal process” and would let it run its course.

Take that defense entirely at face value. It still does not help him, because it is unable to be proven. If the committee would have suspended the ban anyway, the call was irrelevant and the timing looks damning. If the call mattered, the independence claim appears false. There is no version of the public record in which Infantino gets to prove the clean story, because he allowed the presidential call and the favorable ruling (at least favorable to the U.S.) to become permanently entangled. That entanglement is nearly impossible to come back from.

Why the Optics Were the Whole Ballgame

Sophisticated institutions treat the appearance of independence as a substantive requirement. Courts recuse judges over relationships that never influenced a single ruling. Regulators wall off decision-makers from parties with access. Companies document external contacts and build recusal policies precisely so that, when someone later asks “who got to the decision-maker?” there is a clean answer on file. The point of all that machinery is not to prevent influence you can see, to be able to demonstrate, after the fact, that influence you cannot see did not occur.

FIFA had none of that protection here, and the reaction from the rest of the sports world shows how expensive the failure was. UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and said FIFA had “crossed a red line,” warning that “when the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake.” The formerly embattled previous FIFA president Sepp Blatter put it more bluntly: “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.” Jürgen Klopp said the affair “calls everything into question,” and England manager Thomas Tuchel asked the question every compliance officer eventually asks about a discretionary exception: “Who overturns this decision then and when? And on what grounds?”

The Belgium Angle Made It Worse

Governance problems compound when the party harmed by an exception is denied a fair chance to contest it. The Royal Belgian Football Association said it was “astonished” and asked FIFA for a full explanation of why the suspension was lifted. FIFA treated that inquiry as a formal appeal, appointed a judge, and reportedly gave Belgium only a few hours to file before an early-morning deadline. It then ruled the challenge “inadmissible” because the RBFA was “not a party to the proceedings and, as such, has no standing to appeal.” So, the process was flexible enough to reconsider a settled, unappealable suspension after a call from the White House, but rigid enough to shut out the opponent it directly disadvantaged. Discretion that runs in only one direction is a major red flag (or card) for corruption issues.

What If It Wasn’t a Soccer Field, But the HR Department?

Strip away the stadium and the argument gets uncomfortably familiar. A company disciplines an employee under a rule it has publicly called non-negotiable. A politically connected official calls the CEO. Days later, the discipline is quietly suspended, and when a harmed third party asks for the reasoning, they are given a few hours to object and then told they lack standing. Any competent compliance officer would open a file and ask the standard questions: Who participated in the review? What was communicated, and to whom? Were normal procedures followed? Has comparable relief ever been granted absent a well-placed phone call? Would the same result have occurred with no call at all?

None of those questions accuse anyone of wrongdoing. That is the point. They are the questions an institution should be able to answer cleanly by design, because it built the paper trail in advance. FIFA cannot answer these questions cleanly.

Why FIFA, Of All Institutions

This lands harder for FIFA than it would for almost any other organization because FIFA is the textbook case. The 2015 corruption prosecutions made it a permanent fixture of anti-corruption and compliance curricula, and the central lesson of that era was specific: institutions rot when powerful individuals gain outsized, informal influence over processes that are supposed to run independently. The post-scandal reforms were sold precisely as a promise that outcomes would no longer turn on relationships, access, or a phone call to the right person.

That is why the Balogun episode is more than a bad news day. An organization whose entire rehabilitation narrative rests on “we don’t do favors for the powerful anymore” took an almost unprecedented disciplinary action within days of lobbying by a head of state, and then rejected the objection of the aggrieved party on a technicality. Skepticism was the guaranteed output of the situation FIFA created.

The Lasting Question

The merits of the tackle will be argued and forgotten. As it happens, the reversal did not even buy the U.S. anything on the field (Belgium won 4-1 and knocked the hosts out). What will outlast the result is the governance question, and it is not “should Balogun have played?” It is whether FIFA can show that the reversal decision would have been reached if the phone had never rung.

If it can produce that record, the story fades. If it cannot, then FIFA has taught the lesson it should have known better than anyone: an institution does not lose its credibility the moment it is influenced. It loses it the moment it can no longer prove it wasn’t. As Infantino himself put it, “respect for independent institutions and the rule of law is what protects the integrity of our competitions and the credibility of FIFA.” He is right. That is exactly why taking the call, on this case, at this tournament, was the mistake.

Elizabeth Rogers

Legal Research Associate, TRACE