Mauricio Pochettino Should Bench Folarin Balogun

It's the only way to protect the integrity of the World Cup and the honor of the USA.

For the past few weeks, the World Cup has offered a much-needed pocket of good feeling and sanity. As we stagger under the suffocating daily deluge of the Trump administration’s pathological whining, criminality, and incompetence, a month of elite international soccer felt like a genuine respite. It was a chance to focus on something where the performance is skilled, the rules are transparent, and we can just exist without the executive branch turning every passing moment into a grotesque culture war or a personal grift.

Of course, anyone who has spent the last decade watching Donald Trump knew this peace wouldn’t last. I went into this tournament knowing that Trump will muscle his way onto the pitch at the final so he can personally hand the trophy to the victors and bathe in reflected glory.

I knew this because I’d already seen it. Last summer, Trump crashed the podium at MetLife Stadium during the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup final. Rather than handing over the prize and stepping back to let the actual athletes enjoy their moment, he stayed pinned to the stage, hovering awkwardly over Reece James and the Chelsea squad while they tried to celebrate around him. The sheer consternation on the players’ faces told you everything you needed to know about having a hated politician treat their career-defining achievement as a personal photo-op. (And that’s before we found out he liked the gold gyroscope trophy so much he demanded to keep the original for the Oval Office mantlepiece and make FIFA forge a duplicate Chelsea.)

Still, I expected Trump to wait until the tournament was over to ruin the vibes, but he had instead intervened ahead of schedule.

The saga began on Wednesday during the U.S. Men’s National Team’s match against Bosnia and Herzegovina. American striker, Folarin Balogun, was given a red card by the referee. He was kicked out of the remainder of the game and was ineligible to play in the next one, which is scheduled for Monday night in Seattle against Belgium.

Balogun didn’t commit a dirty foul; he didn’t even make a challenge. He simply extended his foot to plant himself on the grass, completely unaware that an opponent’s ankle was sliding into that exact space beneath his boot. Because this resulted in a lot of pain and possible injury for the Bosnian player, it was a foul and warranted a warning (yellow card) rather than a game suspension.

But FIFA, the governing body of the World Cup, had made clear in their competition regulations and explicit pre-tournament directives that the baseline one-match ban for a straight red card was absolute, non-negotiable, and carried no mechanism for a team appeal.

In a normal country, you argue about the bad call, you bemoan the unfairness of the suspension, and you get ready to compete without the player.

Enter the President of the United States. Unwilling to accept a ruling that didn’t go his team’s way, Trump reportedly placed three frantic phone calls to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, badgering him to alter the decision.

And because FIFA is an organization whose historical comfort with backroom compliance rivals that of the Trump real estate empire, they predictably buckled.

On Sunday, FIFA issued a jaw-dropping, unprecedented U-turn. Invoking a bizarre, rarely used probationary loophole in Article 27 of their disciplinary code, they declared that while Balogun’s red card stands on paper, his automatic one-match suspension is magically lifted for a year. He is eligible to play against Belgium today. It is the first time a World Cup red card ban has been wiped away like this since 1962.

The international community is, quite rightfully, beside itself with fury. The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) released a blistering statement expressing total astonishment and disbelief, correctly pointing out that FIFA is violating its own explicit competition regulations. UEFA, the European soccer governing body, weighed in to declare that FIFA has “crossed a red line,” undermining the entire credibility and ethical integrity of the sport.

To see how utterly broken this is, you only have to look across the bracket at England. During their match against Mexico on Sunday, English defender Jarell Quansah was sent off for a legitimate red card foul. Predictably, a British Member of Parliament has already drafted a letter to FIFA requesting that Quansah’s suspension be delayed until after the tournament, explicitly citing the Balogun precedent. If FIFA maintains its institutional integrity and bars Quansah from playing against Norway on Saturday, it will highlight just how inherently unfair and rigged our administrative intervention looks to the rest of the world. Remember, there is no appeals process to distinguish between fair and unfair red cards in this tournament.

For the United States, the rules are apparently whatever the chief executive can bully his way into creating. This isn’t a victory for us; it’s an absolute humiliation. By turning a routine sports disciplinary matter into an exercise in raw political leverage, Trump has shamed the nation on the world stage. He has taken a young, talented American squad and branded them in the eyes of the world as state-sanctioned cheaters who need the executive branch to alter the rulebook just to survive a knockout round.

There is only one clean way out of this self-inflicted ethical gutter. If U.S. head coach Mauricio Pochettino wants to preserve any shred of our national honor, sportsmanship, and the integrity of this tournament, the solution is simple: Do not play Folarin Balogun today.

Pochettino should bench him for the match against Belgium, executing the suspension that the laws of the game dictate, regardless of what political accommodations Trump managed to extract from a compromised FIFA hierarchy. Winning a match because the president manipulated the system isn’t a sports triumph; it’s a moral failure that taints everything that comes after it.

We shouldn’t be surprised. This is simply the inevitable sports iteration of King Midas in reverse—the immutable law that everything this man touches turns completely to shit. He couldn’t even let us have a soccer tournament without injecting his signature brand of norm-shattering institutional rot. If the USMNT takes the pitch today with an illicitly cleared striker, the blemish won’t just belong to FIFA or Donald Trump. It will belong to us.

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