The headlines were as predictable as the opening whistle. Another World Cup arrived trailing controversy: immigration crackdowns, militarized security, exorbitant ticket prices, thousand-dollar train rides. From the very start, we have been reminded that this beloved tournament is one of our most complicated spectacles.
That said, I could not have predicted that Donald Trump would publicly involve himself in Flo Balogun’s controversial red card, a wasted effort that did not, in the end, propel the United States past Belgium and into the quarterfinals.
FIFA’s postponement of Flo’s one-game suspension, which invoked the rarely mentioned Article 27 of its disciplinary code, did more than spark outrage over a single officiating decision. At the very moment the U.S. men’s team was solidifying its status as a worthy steward of the beautiful game, it reinforced one of FIFA's oldest and most corrosive problems: that power matters more than process, influence more than fairness.
For much of this tournament, the United States has surprised its visitors, offering spectacular venues, welcoming neighborhoods, gas station cuisine, and a soccer culture far richer than anyone might have expected.
Massachusetts born and raised, I adored watching Scotland's Tartan Army descend on Boston. Thousands arrived in kilts, singing at full volume, emptying kegs across the city, somehow convincing Fenway Park to trade "Sweet Caroline" for chants celebrating John McGinn. They devoured lobster rolls, debated clam chowder, learned to pronounce Worcester and Leominster, and gleefully decorated everything with orange traffic cones, from the statue of John Harvard to the ducks in Boston Common.
Meanwhile, on the pitch, I, like so many others, fell in love with Cape Verde, whose improbable run captivated millions and reminded us why underdogs endure as they enchant. A team that famously recruited players through LinkedIn quickly became one of the tournament's emotional centers.
Goalkeeper Vozinha, 40-years-old, broke out against Spain, gaining millions of Instagram followers overnight. For a few unforgettable weeks, people who likely couldn’t locate the tiny island country on a map (it’s off Africa’s west coast) suddenly found themselves cheering every move they made.
But it takes remarkably little to undo such goodwill.
Trump's phone call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, and Ted Cruz’s crowing about it a day later, did not just taint the tournament. It contaminated the role of the U.S. within it, screaming of American exceptionalism and an assumption that political power can bend institutions to its will, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had otherwise found reasons to rethink their impressions of the host nation.
FIFA, of course, is no stranger to any of this.
The organization's greatest weakness has never merely been corruption in the financial sense, although historically it’s been really good at that kind of corruption. It is the persistent belief that rules are negotiable for the powerful, a willingness to bend for the biggest stars, on and off the field. For precedent, look no further than the overturning of superstar Cristiano Ronaldo's three-match suspension or Croatia’s “offside” goal because of a hair graze. Flo Balogun’s case now joins this unfortunate lineage, not because the situations are identical, but because the optics tell the same story.
Soccer fans can cope with a lot, from bad calls to heartbreaking missed shots, but struggle when we see that outcomes are no longer governed by the rules of the game. Still, we watch, because at the center is the sport itself, some 90-ish minutes in which 22 players chase a ball across an impossibly large pitch, producing irresistible drama from theatrical flopping to a keeper’s incredible saves.
So, while the World Cup remains a global cacophony of performative nationalism and political theater, capitalistic greed and media pontification, we revel in the beauty of the play, and for the glimpses we get of moments when politics recede and the world discovers, remembers, what it looks like beyond its headlines. Time and time again, beyond the bureaucracy and autocracy, something stubbornly human breaks through, an extraordinary conversation involving so many countries, chants, languages, and stories.
This is precisely why Trump's intervention felt so jarring, an unwanted interruption in the glorious romp that this U.S. men’s team was on. While some might want to see it as a correction of an injustice, soccer fans know that a red card is a red card, and with it come consequences, making his involvement yet another instance of his complete disregard for protocol, for rules, and for procedure, and yet another example that sport has its own moral and cultural logic, and its legitimacy depends on preserving the integrity of competition from arbitrary power.
That said, amid such failure, such flaw, sport remains uniquely capable of producing moments when humanity, however briefly, overwhelms politics. People fill stadiums and city streets to celebrate together, mourn together, and discover that the strangers they were taught to fear may become the people they remember most. So, in spite of it all, we watch.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville University. Bass is the author of One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
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