First, full disclosure: I’m not a soccer fan. I'm a football fan, and a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. So, having said that, let’s start with a hypothetical.
Say the Steelers are heading into a playoff game and their best defensive player just got suspended for a hit the league ruled illegal.
Team owner Art Rooney doesn't like the call. So he picks up the phone, calls NFL commissioner Roger Goodell directly, and leans on him to “take another look.” Two days later, the league reverses course. The suspension is lifted. The player suits up. The Steelers win.
If that happened, I'd be thrilled, and I would not be asking a single question about how it all went down. Because Art Rooney owns the Steelers. Roger Goodell runs Rooney's league. That's a phone call between people inside the same house, playing by rules (well, I would hope they are) that belong to them.
Nobody outside that room would have any right to be outraged, except, of course, if you were a Baltimore Ravens fan. But I digress.
Now here's a real story about how another phone call went down.
Last Thursday, U.S. striker Folarin Balogun picked up a red card during Team USA's win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a foul serious enough to draw an automatic one-match ban, which would have kept him out of tonight’s knockout match against Belgium.
Balogun is the team's leading scorer at this World Cup. Losing him for a win-or-go-home game felt, to a lot of American fans, like a gut punch. Donald Trump decided to meddle. He called FIFA president Gianni Infantino and asked him to "review" the card. My bet? Trump didn’t say the word "review."
On Sunday, FIFA announced the suspension was being set aside, not overturned outright, mind you, but "suspended for a probationary period," a wobbly phrase that bounces off the head and goes out of bounds. It all screams corruption, which America, and the world now knows, is Donald Trump’s middle name.
In the Oval Office on Monday, Trump bragged about what he did. Balogun will start against Belgium tonight, and the world is seething with anger — or at least most of the world.
Now, here's the difference from my Steelers story: Donald Trump doesn't own Team USA. He isn't its coach, its federation president, or anyone with legitimate standing to intervene in a disciplinary process.
I highly doubt Trump is even a soccer fan because it’s not bloody and gory like a UFC match.
He's, gallingly, the President of the United States, and he’s calling the head of an independent global sports body four days before his own country's must-win game. It reeks of favoritism, stacking the deck, and dissing every other team in the tournament.
Let’s do another hypothetical.
What if Belgium's star goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, received a red card during the team’s win over Senegal, and Belgium’s Prime Minister, Bart De Wever, called Infantino and asked him to review Courtois’ red card? That request would stand a snowball's chance in hell.
The last time something like this happened, when a red card suspension was famously bypassed following presidential intervention, was during the 1962 World Cup, when Brazilian star winger Garrincha was cleared to play in the final after political pressure.
There is a reason the last time this happened was 64 years ago, and I don’t think I need to explain why.
Once the suspension was lifted, all hell broke loose.
This time, Belgium's football federation called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable." They appealed the decision, but guess what? They were denied. Go figure!
Former English soccer star and BBC analyst Wayne Rooney called it "an absolute disgrace." Another English former star and current NBC Sports analyst Gary Neville said it "absolutely stinks."
Once politics — or, in this case, the sleazy Trump — gets involved, who knows where or how it stops?
None of this should surprise anyone who's watched Infantino suck up to Trump. He slavishly and ridiculously handed Trump the tournament's first-ever "Peace Prize" last December and has spent months building political cover for him. Infantino runs a federation about to post record profits hosting the biggest live sports event on earth, and Trump is his money ticket because the games are happening here in the U.S.
If Infantino said no to Trump, would Trump sic FCC Chair Brendon Carr on him and threaten the cash cow of broadcasting rights? Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but who knows what the impulsive Trump would do?
It’s a wash, though, since Infantino would change Trump’s diaper if he were asked to.
What makes this so combustible is that it's split fans into three camps. So once again, Donald Trump sows unparalleled division.
American fans who just want their team to win are thrilled because Balogun is irreplaceable, and losing him felt like getting robbed.
Other American fans, the ones who think the undisciplined Trump has no business anywhere near a disciplinary ruling, are embarrassed, and plenty of them are openly rooting for Belgium tonight because Donald Trump inserted himself, again, into a situation where he does not belong.
And fans overseas, many already furious at what Trump's tariffs and uncalled-for Iran war have done to their economies, see this as one more example of the evil Trump being the loathsome Trump. They hate America and Americans because they voted for Trump.
Tonight, they're not just rooting against a soccer team. They're rooting against Trump and against a country they feel put him back in office.
We have now drifted so far away from whether the original red card was the right call. If the U.S. wins tonight, plenty of people around the world will say it wasn't earned, and that with Trump’s intervention, the U.S. cheated.
The U.S. will be the team the whole world roots against.
If the U.S. loses, just as many will call it karma. Either way, the team can't win without controversy. Trump made sure of that, then made it worse by bragging about it afterward, thanking FIFA for "reversing a great injustice."
Whatever the final score says tonight in Seattle, it won't tell the real story. The real story is that once again, everything Donald Trump touches ends up poisoned by Donald Trump, and a tournament that was supposed to belong to the world now has his dirty fingerprints all over it.
If anyone deserves a red card — a permanent one — it’s Donald Trump.