Card Sharps

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 06, 2026

 

There are too many absurdities in the saga of Folarin Balogun’s suspension, and unsuspension, from the World Cup to get very indignant about it.

 

Although I’m willing to get a little indignant. You know me.

 

Balogun is the star striker for the U.S. national soccer team. In the squad’s last match, he was handed a very questionable red card for a foul on an opposing player. That disqualified him from playing in tonight’s round of 16 elimination match against Belgium, the highest-stakes game in American soccer history.

 

The U.S. had lost its best player under dubious circumstances at the worst possible time in a World Cup on its own turf. “Time for the federal government to get involved,” the president surmised, as he often does.

 

Donald Trump reportedly phoned FIFA President Gianni Infantino in the hours after Balogun’s suspension. (You’ll remember Infantino as the man who presented him with the, cough, inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.) What was said between them is unclear, but on Sunday the organization announced that Balogun’s suspension had been changed to probation for a period of one year. He’s eligible to play against Belgium.

 

This will be the first time since 1962 that a player sent off in a World Cup match will take the pitch in his team’s next contest.

 

The first absurdity is that this is the rare Trump scandal in which the president isn’t the most crooked figure involved. That would be FIFA, a byword for institutional corruption to the great majority of the world that follows soccer avidly. Typically that corruption is financial in nature, but the organization isn’t above bending the rules for star players the way it did for Balogun.

 

Ask Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the biggest names in the sport. He received a red card in a qualifying match last fall that should have made him ineligible for Portugal’s first two World Cup matches, tantamount to the NBA suspending Michael Jordan for the first few rounds of the playoffs. Presto change-o: FIFA found a way to postpone the punishment. Ronaldo could play after all.

 

A second absurdity has to do with the circumstances of Balogun’s American pedigree. He’s of Nigerian ancestry, grew up in London, has played professionally in Europe—but, through a twist of fate, was born in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was visiting the U.S. during her pregnancy and tried to board a flight home to the U.K. when she was seven months along, but was refused by the airline. After she was forced to stay put until she delivered, her son became a natural-born American.

 

In other words, one day after the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship under the 14^th Amendment, our anti-immigrant president felt obliged to go to bat for someone whom he and his supporters fervently believe shouldn’t count as American. Don’t tell me the cosmos doesn’t have a sense of humor.

 

The third absurdity has to do with the nature of the call between Trump and Infantino.

 

Sources swore to Axios’ Marc Caputo that the president phoned the FIFA chief merely “to understand the rules, didn’t make a specific ask, & was told it was being independently reviewed.” Laying aside the question of why Trump needed to call the highest authority in global soccer to have a rule explained to him, I bet the sources are right—technically. The words “I’m asking you to overturn Balogun’s suspension” probably didn’t escape Trump’s lips.

 

But what about “FIFA can make a lot of money in America, unless our people hold a grudge because Balogun was ruled out”? Or “If we lose to Belgium, I’m going to smear FIFA by saying that the Cup was rigged because of the dodgy red card”?

 

Which, by the way, the president has now admitted he was planning to do if the suspension hadn’t been lifted.

 

The idea that he didn’t pressure Infantino, explicitly or otherwise, during their chat is preposterous. Sports journalist Ben Jacobs was told that “it was communicated directly to the FIFA President that Trump felt the punishment was unjust” and that “other White House figures also lobbied FIFA.” (Among them, reportedly: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.) The New York Times claimed the president “asked [Infantino] to review the suspension,” at least, and Trump helpfully admitted to that as well in comments to the press on Monday morning.

 

I did not think we were going to get a lesson on postliberalism from the World Cup, of all places. But here we are.

 

Two wrongs.

 

It’s important to the ethical calculus here to understand that the red card awarded to Balogun really was specious. This isn’t a case of the president inventing a nonexistent problem, like a “rigged election,” to create a pretext for some dubious executive intervention. America’s new soccer hero was treated unjustly.

 

“This was not a red card offense,” a professional referee who reviewed the incident explained to ESPN. Yes, Balogun drove his foot into an opponent’s ankle, but he did so accidentally while going for the ball. Referee Raphael Claus didn’t issue a red card in the moment, in fact. It was assessed only after he watched slow-motion replays of the incident to determine the point of contact—which, according to ESPN’s expert, is a violation of instant-replay protocols.

 

To make matters worse, per the Times, Claus had been publicly accused before of “match fixing in Brazil by giving out irregular red cards. Brazilian authorities and FIFA have found no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Claus, but Mr. Trump brought up those allegations in his call with Mr. Infantino.”

 

And as the cherry on top, soccer god Lionel Messi made the same sort of foot-to-ankle contact with an opponent during a play earlier in the tournament. Guess what his punishment was.

 

An obvious wrong was done and now FIFA has undone it. Essentially, the organization was left with a choice between two asterisks. Had Belgium defeated the United States without Balogun, American fans would have claimed that their team’s ouster from the tournament was tainted; as it is, should the United States defeat Belgium with Balogun, it’ll be Belgian (and many other international) fans alleging unfairness. It’s already begun: The Belgians are mad, mad, mad at the extraordinary leniency shown in this case, which forced their team to suddenly scrap its game plan after preparing to face an American side without its star player.

 

Trapped between two bad potential outcomes, FIFA opted for the one that required curing the original injustice. (Which, not coincidentally, sets them up for a win-win. Either Belgium will beat a U.S. team at full strength, removing any asterisk, or the U.S. will advance and soccermania will reach a fever pitch in the world’s richest country.) That’s defensible ethically—or would have been, if not for two things.

 

One is that it’s not clear that FIFA’s own bylaws allow for the sort of appeal that led to Balogun’s suspension being stayed. The reprieve was issued under a rule that permits probation for “disciplinary measures,” but some interpret that as applying to off-field behavior, not on-field offenses like fouls. And Belgian soccer authorities have pointed to another provision that says a one-match suspension after a red card applies automatically, not discretionarily.

 

To repeat: No red cards issued during the Cup have been lifted since 1962. It cannot be that the call on Balogun was so historically bad that it required an administrative intervention not seen since the Kennedy administration.

 

Which brings us to the other unethical element, the president’s intervention.

 

The U.S. national soccer team isn’t a federal agency. It’s governed by the United States Soccer Federation, a nonprofit. The USSF surely has its own lawyers who could have lobbied FIFA for action on the red card. That Trump would assert himself in this matter anyway is everything that’s dumb and ugly about his politics.

 

It’s corrupt, exploiting state power to secure an outcome in an area where the state has no business. It’s boorish, throwing America’s weight around to get something he wants without regard for anyone else’s interests. It’s narcissistic, injecting himself into another cultural spectacle that shouldn’t be politicized by his involvement. And it’s self-sabotaging, as global opinion is destined to turn against Team USA now that its success is tied to Trump’s tactics of squeezing FIFA.

 

“Why would Belgium want to play our team without our best player?” American fans scoffed on Sunday night as Belgians raised a ruckus about Balogun’s reinstatement. “Why would Americans want to win by having Daddy Trump put a thumb on the scale?” Belgians might reply. Surely other teams have been victimized by questionable red cards during this tournament. When do those get overturned?

 

The red card on Balogun was wrong. The president smearing Trump-stink on a World Cup that the entire planet had been enjoying to help the U.S. team is also wrong. Do two wrongs make a right?

 

Americans seem to think so, yes.

 

We’re all postliberals now.

 

You won’t find much angst about Trump leaning on FIFA among U.S soccer fans on social media, including people who are normally harsh critics of his. Sportsball is low stakes, everyone’s rooting for America, and the red card was bogus: How angry can one be at an unethical process when it produced an ethical outcome, Balogun’s reinstatement?

 

But that’s the heart of the difference between liberalism and postliberalism. “Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results,” as I’ve said before. In a liberal system of justice, there are rules one has to follow in appealing an unjust outcome and that appeal will be considered on the merits. Whereas in a postliberal system, the president dials up the appellate judge and asks him to “review” an outcome he doesn’t like, with both parties understanding that the judge will benefit if he rules the president’s way.

 

“A proper result validates improper tactics” is just a fancier way of saying that the ends justify the means. Postliberalism is the conviction that certain outcomes are so righteous that they must be pursued even at the price of breaking traditional rules. (It’s what authoritarians mean when they mumble about “knowing what time it is,” and what progressives intend when they chatter about court-packing.) That’s the Balogun matter in a nutshell.

 

Likewise, it’s distinctly postliberal that Trump and his cronies would take such a considerable—and I do mean considerable—interest in the case. All presidents like to see national sports teams do well, partly out of patriotism and partly because good vibes among voters can only benefit them politically. But I have a hard time imagining George W. Bush “instructing his team to find a way to lift [Balogun’s] suspension,” let alone dialing up Gianni Infantino to complain personally. And that’s not because Bush belonged to the “uniparty” or didn’t love America as much as Trump, or whatever nonsense the chud right might tell you.

 

It’s because Bush, being a traditional conservative, shared the classically liberal belief that there are spheres of life in which government shouldn’t intervene. Postliberalism recognizes no such distinction, especially under a cult of personality like the current one. Trump embodies the country, supposedly, and so any sort of controversy in which it’s involved—public or private, political or cultural—is fair game for his intervention. That’s why his interest in the soccer team’s success is so intense, I’m sure: To a nationalist strongman like the president, their success is his success. And doubly so now that he’s squeezed Infantino for them.

 

Even the White House’s case to FIFA on Balogun’s behalf reeks of postliberal demagoguery and paranoia. If corrupt motives had driven referee Raphael Claus to issue the red card, one might think he would have done so eagerly and immediately rather than wait until he’d reviewed the play on slow-motion video. In the Trump White House, however, all adverse outcomes are presumptively due to bias and cheating. And so, rather than simply challenge the call on the merits, “articles examining previous controversies involving the Brazilian referee circulated among senior government officials as they evaluated every possible argument.”

 

I would have guessed that U.S. soccer fans would be annoyed at Trump for inserting himself into the Balogun controversy, and not just because everyone to the left of Sen. Tommy Tuberville is sick to death of him inserting himself into everything. The American team has played well enough thus far to establish itself as a solid second-tier power, not quite on par with the traditional giants but capable of making things interesting against them over the course of 90 minutes. This World Cup had been a coming-out party of sorts for the United States as a team to be reckoned with.

 

Now, on the day of the biggest match in U.S. soccer history, that success has been overshadowed by a story about the president making sure that our guys get special immunity from bad calls that weaker nations don’t get. And if you believe (which I don’t) that FIFA might have overturned Balogun’s suspension even if Trump hadn’t intervened, it’s worse: By creating an appearance of impropriety here, he’s delegitimized what would have been a meritorious reprieve.

 

It’s all here, in short, every grubby little postliberal pathology wrapped up in an unlikely, and unusually silly, minor scandal. Discrediting institutions by aggressively politicizing them. Prioritizing short-term wins over long-term credibility. Reducing questions of right and wrong to crude “us and them” tribal considerations. And alienating every other tribe needlessly by behaving with imperious just-try-to-stop-us arrogance in insisting on getting one’s way.

 

“If you want to know how Trumpists can hoot and cackle over their side ‘winning’ based on corruption, just look at the universal smirking of Americans over the FIFA decision,” my friend Patrick Frey wrote of the Balogun matter. A country that elected Donald Trump twice was destined to have few qualms about how he’s handled this. We’re all—well, almost all—postliberals now.