Somewhere between England’s third goal against Mexico on Sunday night and my second glass of something cold enough to hurt, my phone lit up with the news that FIFA had suspended Folarin Balogun’s one-match ban.
Not overturned, you understand. Suspended. Parked for a “probationary period” of one year, like a sixth-former caught smoking behind the bike sheds who has promised, hand on heart, never to do it again.
The ban existed for the most boring reason imaginable: the rules. Balogun was sent off against Bosnia and Herzegovina for a nasty stamp on Tarik Muharemovic’s ankle, VAR had a look, and out came the red card. Under FIFA’s regulations a straight red brings an automatic one-match suspension. No appeal, no haggling. That is the entire point of the word automatic.
Except, it turns out, when the president of the host nation picks up the telephone. Donald Trump confirmed, quite cheerfully, that he had called Gianni Infantino to ask for a review of the card, on the expert basis that, in his own words, “I didn’t know what the hell a red card was.” Days later FIFA’s disciplinary committee reached for Article 27 of its own code, suspended the ban, fined US Soccer $40,000 for form’s sake, and Balogun trotted out against Belgium in Seattle on Monday night.
And all I could think of, watching this unfold, was Biff Tannen.
You remember Biff. Back to the Future Part II. The school bully who gets hold of a sports almanac from the future, bets on results he already knows, and builds a casino empire with his name in lights on the front. Screenwriter Bob Gale confirmed years ago that the older, richer, gold-lift-and-terrible-tie version of Biff was modelled on a certain New York property developer. It was a joke in 1989. The joke has now climbed out of the screen, taken the host nation’s armband and started ringing the referee.
Because the almanac was never really about the winnings. The almanac was about certainty, the delicious knowledge that the rules binding everyone else do not bind you. Biff didn’t out-gamble anybody. He simply operated in a market where he alone knew the outcome was negotiable. And Hill Valley in the rewritten 1985 wasn’t richer for it; it was a smoking ruin with one very shiny tower in the middle.
Business readers will recognise this pattern instantly, because it is precisely why the rule of law, rather than oil or talent or sunshine, is the most valuable economic asset any jurisdiction can own. Nobody invests where the courts take phone calls. Nobody signs a contract worth having if enforcement depends on who the counterparty knows. FIFA’s own statutes prohibit political interference, and Infantino insists his judicial bodies acted entirely independently, which would be considerably more soothing had the beneficiary not been the co-host’s star striker, days after a presidential phone call. UEFA said FIFA had “crossed a red line”. Wayne Rooney called it a disgrace. Belgium appealed and was told it had no standing, which is a bold thing to say to the actual opponents in the actual match.
The floodgates duly opened. Within a day the French federation was asking FIFA to look again at a yellow card shown to Michael Olise, and Thomas Tuchel was being asked, with a straight face, whether England ought to start appealing its red cards too.
Sponsors pay billions for this tournament on the understanding that the product is sport rather than scripted television, and analysts are already asking what political capture does to that valuation. I wrote only last week about air-conditioned stadiums and whether this World Cup is really a level playing field; I confess I did not expect the pitch to tilt quite this quickly.
It is the same disease I diagnosed when CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert to keep the White House sweet: institutions discovering, under pressure, that their rules were only ever suggestions. And with the promised World Cup boost already failing to show up in the US jobs numbers, the tournament’s real dividend, trust, is the one asset the hosts can least afford to burn.
Here is the delicious bit, though. Balogun played. And the United States lost 4-1 to Belgium and tumbled out of their own World Cup. Even Biff, clutching his almanac, eventually discovered that rigging the odds is not the same thing as being any good. You can lean on the referee, suspend the suspension and declare a great injustice reversed on your own social network. The scoreboard, bless it, remains one of the last institutions that doesn’t take calls.
