Folarin Balogun will play against Belgium on Tuesday. The United States striker should have been suspended after his red card against Bosnia-Herzegovina, but Fifa, world football’s governing body, has opted not to enforce the automatic one-match ban. The decision followed a phone call from US president Donald Trump to Fifa president Gianni Infantino, according to the BBC’s US media partner CBS News.
Uefa, European football’s governing body, called the move “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”. It said Fifa had “crossed a red line” by intervening to effectively cancel a suspension at a tournament. An automatic ban, Uefa stressed, “is not a discretionary option” but “a principle embedded in regulations”.
“Uefa says Fifa's decision to suspend Folarin Balogun's red card ban is 'unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable'.”
“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 said in a statement. It added that the decision created a precedent that “will now require an equal treatment” for similar situations.
The Belgian Football Association (RBFA) said it was “astonished” that Balogun would not be banned. Belgium’s foreign minister, Maxime Prevot, warned: “If a phone call is really the reason for this incomprehensible decision, it would be a blatant violation of the most basic rules of football and sport.”
Trump thanked Fifa on social media for “reversing a great injustice”. The only other player to escape a World Cup suspension after a red card was Brazil’s Garrincha in 1962, before automatic bans were in place and amid allegations of political interference.
Former Fifa president Sepp Blatter said on X that “football must never become a playground for political power”. Glenn Micallef, the European Union’s commissioner for sport, said decisions on sport “belong to sporting bodies, not politicians”, adding: “Influencing sporting decisions would undermine the autonomy of sport.”
The decision has drawn widespread condemnation, with Uefa warning that the credibility of the tournament itself is now at risk. “We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision,” it said.