A Red Card for Two Presidents. The Balogun Affair, or the Law of Sport Put to the Test by Political Interference

“it is an eternal truth of experience that every man who holds power is inclined to abuse it”[1]

A red card never warrants a jurist’s pen … “subject to exceptions,” as the settled phrase would have it.[2]

The one shown to the American striker Folarin Balogun has nonetheless shaken the football world and everyone, man or woman, who cares about the observance of the rules. For the affair has ceased to be a mere refereeing controversy and become a textbook case, standing at the crossroads of the disciplinary law of sport, the principle of the legality of penalties (nulla poena sine lege), and the question of political interference with the autonomy of the sporting legal order.

I. The Facts

The facts, first. The American forward Balogun was sent off following a challenge on a Bosnian defender (a gesture initially unpunished on the pitch, then reclassified as serious foul play after recourse to the video assistant referee (VAR)). The dismissal carries with it, as of right, an automatic one-match suspension: the minimum sanction that the regulations attach to any red card. FIFA confirmed as much without ambiguity: no avenue of appeal, the matter closed, the striker set to miss the round-of-16 tie against Belgium.

Then everything tips over. According to the concordant reporting of several outlets, including the ever-authoritative New York Times, President Donald Trump telephoned FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, to request a review of the decision. On the Sunday, the eve of the match, FIFA announced, discreetly, on its official website alone and not across all its social-media channels, that Balogun’s suspension had been frozen. The player was cleared to play. The former FIFA president Joseph Blatter, turned white knight for the cause, summed it up in a scathing formula borrowed from the Latin: “Quo vadis, FIFA?” (Whither goest thou, FIFA?). UEFA denounced the crossing of a “red line”; the Belgian federation declared itself “astonished.”

II. The Law

One must still examine the legal machinery rather than yield to indignation. FIFA grounds its decision in Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code, which permits it to “wholly or partially suspend the enforcement of a disciplinary measure”, subjecting the person concerned to a probationary period of one to four years.

The mechanism deserves to be properly understood. The red card stands: it is not erased. Only the enforcement of the one-match suspension is stayed, for a probationary period of one year (should Balogun reoffend within the year, the frozen sanction revives and is added to any fresh penalty). Technically, then, FIFA has not annulled the sanction; it has deferred its enforcement, in the manner of a suspended sentence.

And here the analysis must be honest, even against the prevailing thesis: the mechanism is nothing new. Article 27 had already been deployed for the benefit of Cristiano Ronaldo (a red card in qualifying against Ireland in late 2025, the remainder of his suspension deferred so as to let him begin the World Cup), and likewise for Nicolás Otamendi and Moisés Caicedo, whose suspensions were rearranged in the spring. UEFA’s insistent characterisation of the decision as “unprecedented” therefore lays itself open to criticism. The decision is thus neither “unheard of” nor unused since 1962, as the New York Times supposes.

III. Law as an Instrument of Power

If the rule exists and, on its face, permits a decision of this kind, where then does the flaw lie? Not in the text, but in its use. Three cardinal principles appear to have been undermined.

1. The automatic nature of the sanction and the legality of penalties. Here UEFA seems to us to hold its strongest argument: the one-match suspension consequent upon a dismissal is not a discretionary faculty but a consequence as of right — foreseeable and not open to modulation, applied uniformly to every player sanctioned during the tournament. To turn Article 27 into an instrument for neutralising an automatic sanction, case by case and mid-competition, is to substitute expediency for legality. The principle of the legality of penalties has little love for bespoke exceptions.

2. Equality of treatment. This is doubtless the most embarrassing angle for FIFA. Other players sent off during this very tournament served their suspensions without anyone dreaming of sparing them. The suspicion of a law of variable geometry — severe for the unknown, lenient for the star or the host nation — eats away at FIFA’s credibility.

3. Legal certainty. FIFA had itself issued, before the competition, guidelines recalling the automatic character of suspensions. To reverse itself in the very midst of the knockout stage is to betray the legitimate expectations of the participants and to sacrifice the predictability that gives any norm its worth. Patere legem quam ipse fecisti, runs a Latin maxim that expresses a fundamental principle of law: submit to the law you have yourself made. A maxim that resonates cruelly here.

IV. FIFA Laid Bare

Jurists know it well: rules of procedure are the safeguard of the law, and their breach often conceals unavowable manoeuvres.

Two fundamental defects ought to lead to the annulment of FIFA’s decision.

First, the contradiction in the body’s own position: having asserted that no appeal lay open, FIFA ultimately conceded to the Belgian federation the faculty to challenge the ruling, but within a window so constrained (submissions due at the dawn of the very day of the match) that it verges on an illusory remedy. Yet a remedy that cannot be usefully exercised is no remedy at all: it has the appearance, not the effect.

Second, the opacity: a decision of such magnitude, announced at such short notice and without any developed justification, and absent from the institution’s usual channels of communication, legitimately feeds suspicion. In administrative law as in disciplinary law, the statement of reasons is not a courtesy: it is the guarantee against arbitrariness.

V. Political Interference and the Autonomy of the Sporting Order

There remains the heart of the affair. FIFA’s sporting legal order has always claimed to be autonomous: it enacts its own norms, adjudicates its own disputes, and lays claim to a political neutrality of which FIFA has made a banner. The intervention of a head of State (even if, as he maintains, a mere request for review without injunction) strikes head-on against that autonomy.

And here we join the finest analysis, that carried by certain English-language outlets. It matters little, in the end, whether the telephone call was decisive. The mere appearance that it was suffices to corrupt the decision. Jurists on both sides of the Atlantic know this fundamental principle of law: “Justice must not only be done; it must also be seen to be done.” The harm lies not so much in the outcome as in the doubt it plants. Should the United States prevail, the victory will forever bear the seal of shame. A justice that gives the impression of bending before power ceases to be perceived as justice.

Suffice it to say that the judicial path for the Belgian football union, if it exists at all, is a narrow one, and that the true stakes of the affair are perhaps less judicial than institutional and reputational.

VI. By Way of Conclusion

The Balogun affair is no mere incident of the World Cup. It recalls a truth: the law of sport is law, governed by the same requirements of legality, equality, and legal certainty that structure our national orders. When the guardian of the rules sets about bending them to suit the powers of the moment, it is not merely a one-match suspension that is compromised, but the very credibility of the normative system itself.

Grégory Cludts, Attorney-at-Law

[1]Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, ch. IV.

[2]This piece was written on 6 July 2026, at a time when the round-of-16 tie between the United States and Belgium had not yet been played and the appeal brought by the Royal Belgian Football Association (URBSFA) remained pending.