It was FIFA’s corruption that stunned people, not President Donald Trump’s. The chief executive’s contempt for rules is now taken for granted. What astonished the world was that soccer’s global governing body crumbled in the face of his pressure.To recap, the American striker Folarin Balogun was sent off for jumping on the ankle of a Bosnian player. Under FIFA rules, a player who gets a red card is banned from playing in the following game.Trump was unfamiliar with this rule and, indeed, seemed not to know what a red card was. “I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can’t play in the next game. I said, boy, that’s big, you know.” Typically, he called FIFA to complain and — perhaps less typically — FIFA reinstated Balogun.
The entire soccer world was outraged, including almost every prominent current or former player. Sport, even more than politics, depends on a disinterested application of the rules. I was almost alone in not being shocked, because I start from the presumption that all international bureaucracies are corrupt.President Donald Trump, right, displays a referee red card to members of the media as Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, center, and Carlos Cordeiro, president of the United States Soccer Federation, smile in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2018. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
