Just a day after FIFA rescind Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round of 16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, the story keeps on rolling thanks to FIFA's innate FIFA-ness. On Monday, the Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement about the whole mess, which has raised the twin specters of corruption and incompetence.
The RBFA's statement is a doozy. The association claims it learned of Balogun's un-suspension not from FIFA itself, but through the media reports coming from the tournament press on Sunday. Likely confused and certainly more than a little angry, the RBFA sent a letter to FIFA "requesting a copy of the decision, an explanation of the process that had been followed, and setting out its position regarding the applicable regulations." This is a reasonable request to make, and though FIFA failed to communicate to Belgium the results of their decision about Balogun prior to it leaking to the press, FIFA could have turned that into a minor oversight by simply sharing its reasoning with the RBFA. Not so fast, my friends! Because this is FIFA, things got very weird after Belgium sent that their request for clarity. The next part of the RBFA statement reads:
As its only response, FIFA sent a letter to the RBFA stating that it considered this correspondence to constitute an appeal, that a judge had been appointed, and that the RBFA had only a few hours to complete that appeal. No information whatsoever was provided by FIFA.
What? If the RBFA statement is to be believed, then FIFA still has not made information surrounding the un-suspension decision available. And yet somehow the Belgian association had to submit appeals materials by 5:00 a.m. PT on Monday morning, to some random judge, without even knowing what grounds were available for them to base their appeal.
This is a bonkers way to conduct a soccer tournament, and the controversy surrounding Balogun's return to the field is entirely of FIFA's making. Every other league and international competition in the world manages to have a clear appeals process for adjudicating red-card suspensions, to the point that those suspensions being overturned are a matter of routine because each decision comes with a clear explanation. For some reason, what works for everyone else isn't good enough for FIFA, which instead chooses to overrule disciplinary actions by applying Article 27, which gives the governing body the ability to wipe out or delay a suspension without needing to explain itself. Even in a case like this, where there is a clear and justified reason for overturning Balogun's suspension—VAR was misapplied, showing referee Raphael Claus slowed-down and still images of the foul in violation of VAR rules—FIFA can't be bothered to do itself the favor of explaining its entirely reasonable decision, which only makes the whole process look inherently compromised. In the space left by FIFA's refusal to explain itself, Donald Trump gets to run his mouth about reportedly calling FIFA president Gianni Infantino to "discuss" the red card, and it's impossible not to smell corruption.
And now, FIFA is compounding its initial bungling of the situation by running the RBFA through what appears to be an on-the-fly appeals process that the Belgians don't even fully understand. It's a double bungling! And none of it needed to happen, because a simple explanation from FIFA would have smoothed out most of the rough edges, and the focus today wouldn't be on Balogun's availability, but rather on how the USMNT's high-pressing system would work against Belgium's older core of players.
Then again, this is exactly the stupid controversy that FIFA deserves. Even during a tournament where the games have been unbelievably good, and where the atmospheres have been amazing, FIFA can't help but score an own goal by failing to be the one thing it was supposedly built to be: world soccer's governing body.
UPDATE, 1:10 p.m. ET - FIFA has dismissed Belgium's appeal.
