Oh dear. Such a shame to see the US lose at football after their insanely embarrassing president cheated for them. Still, it really brought the world together. The last time this many people cheered on a Belgian resistance, it was 1914 and the Germans had just crossed the Meuse. As you’ll be aware, the USA were dumped out of their own World Cup on Monday night by a wholly superior Belgium, after Donald Trump boasted that he’d personally intervened in three phone calls with Fifa president Gianni Infantino to get the red card shown to USA striker Folarin Balogun rescinded. Yes, the US cheats at football. Pass it on.
You’ve heard a lot about shithousery during this tournament. We have even, excruciatingly, seen a few American commentators attempt to use the word in conversation. Guys, please, just – no. It’s not for you. You have ’erbs, “a couple things”, and “a ways to go”. But let’s call the events of the past few days by the name they deserve in all the languages of the world: Whitehousery.
Some absolute Whitehousery has been on display and the world certainly has a way (singular) to go before we all forget it. As he made very clear, Trump really wet his Depends over Balogun’s ban, and spent Monday gibbering to the news cameras that he’d acted hideously inappropriately over the weekend by interfering because “I’m good at this stuff”. Righto. It’s somehow especially poignant that Trump genuinely thought he was going in to bat for the national side. After all, the only humane sporting reply to that is: oh my god, don’t let him bat! Look at the state of him! He can’t bat to save his life! Weird that Trump supposedly understands such a lot about sport, but doesn’t get that if you do something outrageously unfair, your opponents will so often use that injustice to fire themselves up and beat you. But look, maybe those aren’t the dynamics in the necrotic golf games Lindsey Graham lets him cheat in. (“Some people say you may outdrive him, but you’re not going to outdrive his caddie,” Graham told a grand jury in Trump’s election interference case in 2022. “It is what it is.”)
A lot of people rightly feel sorry for Balogun, who never asked to find the president’s malevolently gelatinous form supposedly in his corner. In fact, presumably the London-raised Balogun particularly didn’t, given he’s precisely the sort of chap whose birthright citizenship Trump would have done anything to limit until the supreme court finally struck down his attempts to do so last week. But, to quote a phrase, it is what it is.
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No one, however, feels remotely sorry for Fifa president Infantino, to whom the focus must now decisively shift. Infantino produced some extreme bullshit explanation for why Fifa’s supposedly independent judicial bodies triggered the opaque article 27 and overturned the ban, which I saw ran in one US publication under a headline including the words “Infantino defends Fifa’s integrity”. Sorry, Fifa’s what?
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I can’t believe it’s come to this, but we’re now officially in the nihilistic “Bring back Blatter” era. Former Fifa president Sepp Blatter – last seen looking like he was sleeping in his car yet somehow finally contriving to be cleared of corruption charges on appeal last year – yesterday launched a two-footed attack on his successor over the whole business. “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls,” he stated. By what then? Sacks of cash and luxury watches? Apparently not. “They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies,” Blatter thundered. Wow, who knew, etc.
If it seemed like Uefa couldn’t hate Infantino more, meanwhile, it turned out it definitely could. European football’s governing body issued its own lengthy statement tipping all over the call. “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,” this ran. “We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.” It had, Uefa declared, “crossed a red line”. A red line? A red line?! Call me cartography-obsessed, but I feel like we crossed that line a few moral galaxies ago. Maybe when Infantino was butching it out in the photocall at Trump’s Gaza Peace Summit For Ghoulishly Rapacious Businessmen (not its official title). Certainly when Gianni inaugurated the auto-satirical Fifa peace prize and awarded it to Trump just a couple of months before the president decided to truly live according to its values and launch a war on Iran.
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Anyway: developments. A rising tally of members of the European parliament have called for an ethics investigation into Fifa because of the Balogun affair. So, the European parliament calling for an ethics investigation and Sepp Blatter suggesting you’re bent – if irony could kill, we could be looking at a bloodbath.
Unfortunately, it can’t. No football match could be as fixed as Infantino’s presidential security at Fifa – not even if Trump’s USA played the bribery-assisted 1993 Marseille side and it was overseen by corrupt German referee Robert Hoyzer. Infantino is simply unbeatable – currently – within the organisation he leads because of the way he’s played the member associations outside Europe with patronage and development cash. Eventually that will change – at Fifa, there’s always someone ghastlier and hungrier waiting for their chance in the end. But for now, Trump and Infantino are free to poison their own tournament. Let’s just hope the eventual champions realise their final tactical play will be doing everything possible to avoid these two villains annexing the glory.
