The President Who Had to Win the Beautiful Game
A single phone call from the Oval Office bent FIFA’s rules for one American player, drew a sharp rebuke from Europe’s football federation, and turned a global sporting festival into a case study in the abuse of power. On the field in Seattle, the score was 4–1. The score on American credibility abroad will take longer to add up.
There is a certain kind of president who cannot stand to be told that a call is final. Donald Trump watched the U.S. men’s national team win a knockout round match at the World Cup he is co-hosting, saw the referee flash a red card at his star striker Folarin Balogun, and, according to reporting by The New York Times and confirmed by the president himself, picked up the phone to FIFA president Gianni Infantino to demand that the world’s governing body of soccer reconsider. Within days, it did. And with that reconsideration, FIFA did not simply reinstate a player. It reinstated a lesson the rest of the planet had already learned about this administration — that in Trump’s America, the rules bend for whoever the president decides they should bend for, and everyone else is expected to smile and applaud.
The bare facts are not in dispute. On July 1, in a Round of 32 match against Bosnia and Herzegovina in which the U.S. would win 2–0, Balogun stepped on the ankle of defender Tarik Muharemović and, after a VAR review, was shown a straight red. Under FIFA’s own long-standing rules — the same rules every other player in the tournament plays under — a straight red card triggers an automatic one-match ban that cannot be appealed by the player’s team. Balogun was to miss the Round of 16 match against Belgium. That is how the sport works. That is how the sport has always worked.
Then the president called. According to sources cited by the Associated Press, CBS News, and multiple international outlets, Trump reached Infantino the same day the red card was issued. He was not alone: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House’s World Cup task force, also worked the phones; Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly demanded the card be rescinded. On Sunday, July 5 — one day before kickoff against Belgium — FIFA announced that Balogun’s suspension had been suspended for a one-year probationary period under the discretionary authority of Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code. Balogun would play. The U.S. would lose 4–1 anyway. The tournament would go on, but the damage would remain.
I. The Call That Should Never Have Been Placed
Trump has been characteristically candid about what he did. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, he confirmed the call and boasted about the outcome. “I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” he said, according to the CBS transcript. “I thought it was two great athletes that crashed into each other and got entangled.” He added — this is a direct quote from a sitting American president discussing the sport being played in his own country — “I didn’t know what the hell a red card was.” He then went on to disparage the referee, Brazil’s Raphael Claus, telling reporters that “this referee is a bit suspicious if you look at his past” — a claim he did not elaborate on and for which he offered no evidence. The Brazilian Football Confederation formally defended Claus against Trump’s smear.
Consider the tableau. The president of the United States, host nation of the 2026 World Cup, freely admits he did not understand the rules of the sport before intervening at the highest level to change the outcome of a disciplinary matter for the benefit of the home team. He questions the professional integrity of an official from an allied nation on national television without evidence. He then thanks the governing body publicly for “reversing a great injustice” while simultaneously insisting he “didn’t tell him what to do.” Both cannot be true. One is a boast; the other is a denial. When a president needs both, he is admitting the thing he claims not to have done.
“Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. Football must never become a playground for political power.”
— Sepp Blatter, former FIFA president
II. The World Keeps Score
The reaction abroad was immediate and, for anyone who cares about how America is perceived, brutal. UEFA — European football’s governing body — issued a statement Monday saying FIFA had “crossed a red line” and calling the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” In language that reached beyond soccer, UEFA warned: “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.” Read that sentence again, but replace “the game” with “the international order,” and you have the entire postwar American project in a single line.
The Royal Belgian Football Association said it was “astonished” and called the reversal a “direct contradiction” of the tournament’s own competition regulations, which state plainly that a red card produces an automatic ban. When Belgium sought to formally appeal, FIFA declared the appeal inadmissible on procedural grounds. Belgium’s head coach Rudi Garcia, asked to comment, quipped that he “didn’t know that at the FIFA World Cup, the 5th of July is now the 1st of April.” Norway’s coach Ståle Solbakken called it, per the Associated Press, “a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad decision that will hurt the World Cup.” England manager Thomas Tuchel, whose defender Jarell Quansah was sent off in the same round with no such reprieve, asked pointedly: “Who overturns this decision and when and on what grounds? And how far does this go now?” Former Manchester United and England star Wayne Rooney called it an “absolute disgrace” and said “Infantino should be ashamed.” Gary Neville said it “absolutely stinks.” German coaching great Jürgen Klopp, quoted in Forbes, was blunt: “This is our game, not theirs. If Trump and Infantino really worked this all out between themselves, that’s crazy. It calls everything into question.”
UEFA declares FIFA has “crossed a red line”
Europe’s football federation warned that a one-match automatic red-card ban is “not a discretionary option” and that FIFA’s reversal for the U.S. host team creates a precedent that “undermines the credibility of a competition.” The Hill
Ex-FIFA reformer calls it “blatant abuse of power”
Mark Pieth, the Swiss attorney who chaired FIFA’s Independent Governance Committee a decade ago, told Newsweek that Trump and Infantino were “playing the power game at the expense of football and fans.” Newsweek
Analysts see MAGA “on full show” globally
Simon Chadwick, professor of Afro-Eurasian sport at Emlyon Business School, told Al Jazeera the affair marks a visible expansion of Trump’s political leverage over the global governing body of the world’s most popular sport. Al Jazeera
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III. A Governing Body Bows the Knee
Infantino’s response is, if anything, more troubling than the intervention itself. In a carefully lawyered statement on Monday, the FIFA president confirmed he had received Trump’s call and then insisted the decision was made by “independent” judicial bodies. He wants it both ways: the phone call happened, but had no effect. Reasonable people are entitled to disbelieve him. So does the historical record — as the Associated Press noted, it appears to be the first time since 1962 that a red card during a World Cup finals match did not result in an actual suspension. The 1962 precedent, tellingly, was Brazil’s Garrincha — allowed to play the final after political pressure from his own government.
Infantino’s coziness with Trump is neither new nor secret. FIFA gave Trump its inaugural “Peace Prize” in 2025, a decision that prompted 50 members of the European Parliament to formally demand FIFA investigate Infantino for violating the federation’s political-neutrality rules. Trump has been given free tickets, presented trophies, appeared beside Infantino at White House events, and is scheduled to help present the World Cup trophy on July 19. FIFA’s former anti-corruption adviser, Mark Pieth — the man once brought in to reform the organization after the Blatter-era scandals — told Newsweek flatly that the call was “a blatant abuse of power” that demonstrates “how President Trump and Mr. Infantino are playing the power game at the expense of football and fans.”
What FIFA has revealed, in its haste to accommodate one man, is that its independence was always negotiable. If a sporting body’s most solemn assurance — that its rulebook applies to everyone equally — can be shelved with a phone call from a president who admits he does not understand the sport, then the rulebook is a piece of theater. The governing body has told every autocrat watching from every future host nation exactly what price its dignity carries.
IV. The Cost to America
Americans who love this country and want it respected in the world should understand what happened this week as something more than a sports story. When a president places a call to bend the rules of a global institution for a domestic advantage that lasts one game, he does not merely dishonor his office. He tells every allied nation, every trading partner, every diplomatic counterpart, every referee of every international agreement, that the United States is not to be trusted to abide by the rules it publicly professes. Fair play is not a slogan. It is a foreign policy asset — one this country spent eight decades accumulating and one this administration is spending like a man who inherited a fortune he did not earn.
Axios reported that “World Cup fans’ romance with America has soured” after the intervention. That is a mild way of putting what other outlets have described in harsher terms. The Belgian federation, having been told its formal appeal was procedurally inadmissible before it could even be heard, released a statement saying that when Belgium took the field it would not be defending its federation but rather “defending football, whether it’s ethics or integrity.” Belgium then won 4–1. There is a poetry to that scoreline that no propaganda office can massage away. The president got his player on the field and lost anyway — and along the way, he handed every skeptic of American power a free week of talking points.
There is also, unavoidably, the character of the intervention itself. Balogun was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents. He is precisely the kind of American — a birthright citizen, a child of immigrants, a young man of achievement — whose right to be an American this same administration has spent months trying to erase in court, having just lost a high-profile Supreme Court fight over birthright citizenship days earlier. The president is happy to intervene at FIFA on behalf of a Black immigrant American when the American in question can score goals for the president’s own vanity project. The rest of the time, we are asked to believe those Americans are the problem. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the point.
“When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.”
— UEFA, official statement, July 6, 2026
V. The President at the Center of Everything
The Balogun affair fits a pattern that is by now impossible to miss and impossible to defend. This is a president who cannot watch a domestic sporting event without needing to insert himself, cannot see a global stage without wanting to occupy every square inch of it, cannot tolerate a decision he did not make. The tell was in his own words to reporters. Asked why he had intervened, Trump did not offer a constitutional theory of the presidency, or an argument that the referee had misapplied the rules, or a claim of any injustice a citizen could not have raised on his own. He simply said the player was “our best player” and the call was “horrible,” and that he — Donald Trump — is “good at this stuff” and “understands sports really well.” The reasoning is entirely personal. There is no principle to defend, only a preference to enforce. That is the definition of caprice, and caprice at the head of a nuclear-armed state is not a joke.
It is worth cataloguing what else this president is at the center of, because the record is now long. Threats to erase whole civilizations on social media over policy disagreements. Public feuds with the Pope. Attacks on referees, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and civil servants who fail to rule his way. A White House “task force” that includes the Commerce Secretary and Andrew Giuliani working phone lines to lobby a foreign-based sports federation. A pattern in which no institution — private, foreign, sacred, or judicial — is beyond the reach of a demand from the Oval Office that it produce the outcome the president wants. This is not the behavior of a president who understands his office as a trust. It is the behavior of a man who understands his office as a lever.
The 25th Amendment Was Not Written for the Emergency We Expected
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet — or of “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare a sitting president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That single word, unable, is where the constitutional argument now lives.
The framers of the amendment made a choice: they never defined it. Fordham law dean John D. Feerick, the amendment’s principal drafter, and the scholars who have studied his work at length have documented what the record makes explicit — that the drafters “expressly disclaimed any intent to define ‘inability'” and instead, per the Fordham Clinic on the amendment, “purposefully set forth a flexible standard intentionally designed to apply to a wide variety of unforeseen emergencies.” They knew, in 1965, that they could not predict the shape of every future crisis. They wrote a door, not a keyhole. As PBS NewsHour summarized after consulting constitutional scholars, “the drafters used intentionally vague and open-ended language… because they recognized they couldn’t predict every scenario in which a president could be deemed disabled.”
“Those deciding whether a President is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office’ should focus on the overall effects of the inability — whether the totality of the circumstances suggests that inability prevents [him from doing the job].”
— Findings of the Fordham Clinic on the 25th Amendment
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and himself a constitutional law professor, has been building this case in real time. In April, he introduced the Commission on Presidential Capacity Act — invoking the amendment’s own “other body” clause — with fifty co-sponsors. Raskin’s stated rationale drew on Trump’s “increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming public statements,” and he told colleagues, per his own press release, that “we are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment.” More than seventy House Democrats have separately called for either impeachment or invocation of Section 4 in recent months.
The president’s decision to phone Infantino is not, standing alone, a Section 4 case. Nobody at 2547NOW argues that. What it is, is another data point in a totality of circumstances that has grown too large to dismiss. A president who, in his own words, “didn’t know what the hell” the rule was, then intervened in a foreign-domiciled adjudication of that rule because his home team’s star player was affected, then publicly maligned a referee from an allied nation, then celebrated the reversal as his personal victory — this is not the behavior of a person exercising the powers and duties of the office. It is the behavior of a person who has confused the office with himself.
The practical barriers are real and they are enormous. Section 4 requires the concurrence of Vice President JD Vance, a loyalist who will never sign such a declaration, and a majority of a Cabinet the president has personally selected. If the president contests the finding — and he would — two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the current Republican Congress would be needed to sustain it. As things stand today, none of this is politically operable. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a fantasy.
But the barriers do not extinguish the argument. They only postpone the reckoning. The reason the drafters left “inability” undefined is that they understood constitutional guardrails must exist even when they cannot yet be enforced. The record must be built before it can be used. Every commentator who names the pattern, every lawmaker who cosponsors Raskin’s commission, every citation of an act as reckless as the Infantino call — these are not empty gestures. They are the slow, deliberate accumulation of the constitutional record that the framers of the 25th Amendment intended to leave available for the moment when the political configuration finally allows it to be picked up. The Constitution does not enforce itself. Congress does. And Congress will only do so when the people demand it.
VI. Priorities, in Full View
Here is what a president chose to spend his week on. Not the crisis in Ukraine. Not the humanitarian catastrophes his own policies have compounded. Not the mass layoffs rippling through the federal workforce. Not the collapse of federal disaster preparedness heading into hurricane season. Not the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship, which Balogun himself embodies. Not the NATO summit in Ankara he was leaving that very night. He spent it, and had his Commerce Secretary and his White House task force staff spend it, on a red card in a soccer match.
That is not a matter of policy preference. It is a matter of executive attention — a scarce and consequential resource in any administration. What a president attends to reveals what a president is for. This president is for himself. He is for winning small victories on stages large enough to reflect his image back to him at scale. He is for using the machinery of the American state to erase inconveniences no other citizen could dream of erasing. The soccer match is a sideshow. The instinct is not.
American democracy has weathered vain presidents before. What is new is a president whose vanity is treated by his own party as a governing philosophy, and by a compliant international sports body — and, we should worry, by other international bodies — as a policy input to be accommodated. The Balogun affair will be over by the weekend. The precedent will not. The next time a leader of a host nation wants to bend a rule for a citizen, a company, or a political ally, they will point to July 5, 2026, and ask why the rule that broke for America should not break for them. FIFA will not have an answer. Because there isn’t one.
Editorial Conclusion
A president called a foreign governing body to bend a rule for a domestic advantage, admitted on camera that he did not understand the rule he was calling to bend, and then claimed victory when the body complied. The world watched, took notes, and drew conclusions. The United States is no longer the country its passport still promises it is.
The 25th Amendment does not require a diagnosis. It requires a determination. The framers left “inability” undefined precisely so that a future Congress — the one the American people are entitled to elect this November and again in 2028 — would have the constitutional room to make that determination when the pattern grew undeniable.
The pattern is undeniable. What remains is the political will to say so out loud. That is the citizen’s work now. It begins with refusing to normalize what happened this week — not the loss on the field, but the phone call that preceded it. Fair play was never just a game.
Sources & References
- Associated Press / PBS NewsHour — FIFA lifts U.S. player Balogun’s red card suspension at World Cup after Trump calls Infantino
- CBS News — U.S. star Folarin Balogun’s red card suspension lifted after Trump called FIFA president
- CBS News — FIFA criticized for decision to lift U.S. star’s red card suspension following Trump phone call
- CNBC — U.S. loses to Belgium 4-1; Balogun plays after Trump calls FIFA
- Al Jazeera — Why FIFA’s Balogun red card suspension after Trump call is so controversial
- Al Jazeera — ‘MAGA agenda on display’: FIFA, Trump slammed amid Balogun red card row
- Euronews — Infantino says he told Trump FIFA’s disciplinary body was independent during call over Balogun
- France 24 — FIFA lifts Balogun’s World Cup suspension after Trump calls Infantino
- Newsweek — Sepp Blatter slams Trump’s call; ex-FIFA reformer calls it “blatant abuse of power”
- Forbes — “Crossed a red line”: FIFA draws ire over Balogun red card suspension after reported Trump call
- The Hill — UEFA slams FIFA over Balogun red card reversal
- The Hill — Former FIFA president Blatter questions “political power” after Trump-Infantino call
- The Hill — Folarin Balogun, FIFA’s World Cup red card controversy and Trump: Five things to know
- Axios — Trump’s FIFA call over Balogun red card spoils Europe’s World Cup
- NPR — Historic World Cup furor at ‘incomprehensible’ FIFA decision to let U.S. forward Balogun play
- Washington Post — Trump says he asked FIFA head to review red card but “didn’t tell him what to do”
- American Constitution Society — The Incapacitation of a President and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment: A Reader’s Guide
- PBS NewsHour — Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works
- Common Dreams — Raskin bill would create commission to examine president’s fitness
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin demands White House physician evaluate Trump’s cognitive fitness
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