Trump just gave FIFA the VAR check it deserves
President Donald Trump didn’t need to sit in a VAR booth to review FIFA’s decision about Folarin Balogun, America’s ironically not-very-American star forward. He just heard the anger and called his friend at the top, Gianni Infantino.
It was a VAR check of VAR, resulting in a second change to an original decision, one that now carries the stench of political interference at FIFA to favor a World Cup host country and its notoriously mercurial leader.
This is an uncomfortable moment for soccer’s governing class. It’s VAR’s own logic, turned back on the institution that built it: stop the game, review the incident, ask whether the original call survives scrutiny.
If video review is legitimate because it corrects clear and obvious match-changing errors, then football needs an equally trusted way to correct video review when it overreaches.
Otherwise soccer’s accountability process goes only one way.
FIFA and VAR’s critics should pinch their noses. Trump’s naked opportunism is also exposing the absurdities of FIFA’s approach to VAR. The Balogun case is a high-profile mess that may finally lead to some meaningful changes.
The Balogun Blunder
This particular debacle began last Wednesday in Santa Clara, when referee Raphael Claus watched Balogun come down on a Bosnian defender’s ankle and called nothing at all—no red card, not yellow, not even a foul.
Then the video assistant referee intervened. Claus was summoned to the pitchside monitor, studied the collision in slow motion and stills, and an awkward aerial tangle became a straight red card for Balogun.
That came with an automatic one-match ban attached, costing the U.S. their goal machine in the next round.
Enter, Trump: he called FIFA’s president and asked him to review the decision, according to a person familiar with the call, per AP.
Four days later, FIFA announced that Balogun’s suspension had itself been suspended, freeing America’s leading scorer to face Belgium in Monday night’s round of 16 in Seattle.
“It absolutely stinks, let’s be really clear,” said former England and Manchester United defender Gary Neville, a pundit for Britain’s ITV Sport.
“But what I would say is the thing that stinks the most is there should be a review process in place, because I actually didn’t think it was a red card. I think there should be a process which allows it to be overturned.”
In that way, Neville, a member of Britain’s left-leaning Labour Party, apparently aligned himself with the Trump view.
Still, Neville would be “absolutely raging” about FIFA’s decision “from nowhere” if he was Belgium and every other team with a questionable red card decision against them.
Trump’s Review of the Review
Trump exploited a perennial superstition in soccer, a belief that fuels fevered debate among fans in the workplace, the bar, the home: every consequential decision is immediately in dispute and deserves one more look.
The president’s intervention actually went further than a single phone call from the White House.
A U.S. official told Axios that the government provided additional evidence that was used in FIFA’s deliberations, and that Trump wanted to understand why the red card and suspension were imposed.
U.S. Soccer, which never filed a formal appeal, acknowledged it had been “engaged” with FIFA throughout.
When the decision landed, Trump declared on Truth Social: “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”
Not entirely true. FIFA did not technically reverse the red card, which still stands. Instead, FIFA deferred Balogun’s punishment.
That distinction, as we will see, is the heart of the story, and doesn’t allow FIFA off the hook. It is one alleged “great injustice” corrected by committing another.
Slow Motion Bias
The Balogun foul is exactly the kind of call VAR skeptics distrust. A live-speed football collision that seemingly becomes morally clearer, and more damning, when frozen and replayed frame by frame.
IFAB’s protocol says video review should intervene only for a clear and obvious error, and FIFA’s own replay guidance says the intensity of an offense should be judged at normal speed.
Yet the referee who saw the challenge live called no foul, and the red card emerged from a monitor review built on slow-motion video and stills.
Mark Clattenburg, the former FIFA and Premier League referee now serving as a rules analyst for Fox Sports, said that at real speed the incident didn’t look like much.
“I thought it was just the coming-together of two players,” Clattenburg said, adding that a red card requires speed, force and malice, and “this lacked that.”
In his view it, should not have been a VAR intervention at all.
Balogun himself, speaking in Seattle before the reprieve, said a yellow card “would have been fair” because there was nowhere else to put his leg. He also said he accepted the decision.
VAR’s great flaw is not that it sees too little. It is that it sometimes sees too much, or sees the wrong thing too intensely.
As Clattenburg put it, what the Balogun incident “does have, which is what the element of the VAR is hiding behind, is it endangers the safety of the opponent.”
Contact that looks accidental at full speed can look criminal in isolation, one frame at a time. Every slow-motion replay converts a question of intent into a damning portrait of consequence.
“However, in my opinion, this didn’t endanger the safety of the opponent,” Clattenburg said.
“Balogun doesn’t even look for the foul. It’s one of them where it happens in a split second […] it was an accidental challenge. And for me, this didn’t reach the criteria of a red card, and it shouldn’t have been a VAR intervention.”
America’s Accidental No. 9
Beneath the fuss about the FIFA decision, there’s an irony to Trump’s intervention on behalf of Balogun, not an obvious symbol of American nationalism, and especially not for this White House.
Balogun is American in the most constitutionally American way possible: purely by accident of birthright citizenship.
He was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents visiting the U.S., moved back to London at one month old, was developed by Arsenal, represented England at under-21 level, was eligible for Nigeria and ultimately chose the United States in 2023.
The striker has played for U.S. national teams but never for an American club; his professional career runs through Arsenal, Middlesbrough, Reims and Monaco.
His three goals this tournament have matched Landon Donovan’s 2010 total for the second-most by an American at a World Cup.
The political timing only sharpens the irony.
On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, ruling 6-3 that children born on American soil are citizens at birth regardless of their parents’ status.
Yet five days later, the same president intervened to keep Team USA’s most prominent birthright-citizen striker on the field.
Balogun’s story sits directly inside the debate Trump tried to reopen and lost, for now. Trump and the Republicans are still exploring other options to crack down on birthright citizenship, including through Congress.
But the political movement that has treated citizenship-by-birthplace as an illegitimate loophole discovered, at a World Cup, that it can also be a serious competitive advantage. And one it’s willing to defend, no less.
The Card Stayed. The Punishment Vanished
Ironies aside, the mechanism is the scandal here. FIFA’s World Cup regulations make a red-card suspension automatic and unappealable unless the disciplinary committee extends it.
So, FIFA did not overturn anything. It reached instead for Article 27 of its disciplinary code, which lets a judicial body suspend the implementation of a sanction, and placed Balogun’s ban on a one-year probation.
This was politically-convenient flexibility, not exoneration. FIFA kept the red card on the books while making the consequence disappear for the one game that mattered.
There is a pattern. In November, FIFA deferred the final two games of Cristiano Ronaldo’s three-match ban so he could open the World Cup; Nicolás Otamendi and Moisés Caicedo received similar deferrals in April.
But those reds came in qualifiers and were resolved before the tournament began.
No player sent off during a World Cup had been allowed to play his team’s next match since Brazil’s Garrincha in 1962, a reprieve that also followed political pressure and delivered Brazil a title.
It took 64 years for soccer to repeat that favor, and it happened for the host nation’s star, days after its head of state called the man in charge of FIFA.
About that relationship: Infantino awarded Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize at December’s World Cup draw, greasy but effective soccer diplomacy.
Infantino has ingratiated himself with Trump, so when the Balogun request came, FIFA had both the elastic mechanism and the warm relationship ready to accommodate it.
It’s Gianni’s flexible FIFA: strict enough to preserve authority, flexible enough for discretion when friends in very high places come calling.
Belgium’s Belated April Fool’s
Pity Belgium in all this. They have to face Balogun tonight, having spent days preparing tactically to face a U.S. team they thought would be without him. In soccer, that’s a genuine disadvantage.
Belgium’s federation said it was “astonished,” argued the decision flouts FIFA’s written rules, and is investigating all potential options to fight back.
Coach Rudi Garcia was blunter, comparing FIFA’s decision on July 5 to April Fool’s Day. He insisted Belgium was defending football’s ethics and integrity, not merely its bracket.
England’s Thomas Tuchel, whose own player Jarell Quansah was sent off against Mexico, asked the question that should haunt FIFA: “Where does this end?”
Tuchel joked that Harry Kane could ask Trump—who praised England’s star striker—to intervene. But it’s the kind of joke that stops being funny when someone tries it for real. It feels inevitable in this World Cup.
“Who overturns this decision and when and on what grounds? And how far does this go now? It is just strange for me. We just want to have consistency in the decisions,” Tuchel said.
A second look can be justice, as wronged soccer fans know well, but one available only to the powerful is favoritism, and it corrodes every card shown for the rest of the tournament.
If FIFA ever grants the same Article 27 relief to a mid-tournament red card for a small federation with no superpower patron, the favoritism critique collapses.
Nothing in FIFA’s history suggests anyone should expect that.
No More Presidential Appeals
So Trump’s intervention was the wrong mechanism aimed at a real problem, and the answer is not to pretend the problem away.
When VAR upgrades a live-speed non-call into a straight red, FIFA should be required to explain itself publicly.
Why did this incident meet the clear-and-obvious threshold and why did the foul warrant red at normal speed? This is the standard its own guidance already implies.
A transparent review of contested VAR reds, available equally to Belgium, Bosnia and Burkina Faso, would have spared everyone this strange and frustrating spectacle.
Soccer needs an appeals court credible enough that nobody thinks a powerful president has to become one. Such a process would be a defense for FIFA against political meddling if nothing else.
Trump VAR-checked FIFA and got the decision he wanted. It’s embarrassing for soccer that FIFA had no better way to check itself without him.
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