By Cheché Vidal
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Sport competitions, like athletes, are not perfect. As I establish in my book of that same name, Fair Competition, just as Fair Play, does not demand perfection: it demands the constant pursuit of excellence, sustained effort toward it even in the face of error and adversity.
Just as we expect an athlete to pursue their own excellence in every play, beyond what the rules require, that virtuous competitiveness the ancient Greeks called aretê, we expect the same from the institutions that organize competition, and all the more so from those the entire world is watching, like the FIFA World Cup.
But what is even more notable, not every test of Fair Play arrives through an athlete’s gesture. Some arrive through an institution’s decision, and reveal, just as clearly, whether a system is living up to the excellence it claims to protect, that is, whether it becomes a Fair Competition. The question we must then ask ourselves is not whether FIFA, or its World Cup, can be perfect. It is whether, faced with the imperfection inevitable in any system, it genuinely pursues that excellence or merely administers its own exceptions.
Nothing exemplifies that uncertainty better at this 2026 World Cup than the case of U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, sent off during the round-of-16 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina for what VAR review deemed a red-card offense: inadvertently stepping on the back of an opponent’s leg. His own coach called it “a normal action in football.”
Article 10.5 of the FIFA World Cup 26 Regulations states, in unambiguous terms: “If a player or team official is sent off as a result of a direct or indirect red card (second caution), they will automatically be suspended from their team’s subsequent match.”
On July 5, after opening formal disciplinary proceedings two days earlier, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee found Balogun guilty not only of the infraction behind the card, but also of a second charge for celebrating on the pitch despite his expulsion. It imposed a one-match suspension and a $40,000 fine, and then, invoking Article 27 of the Disciplinary Code, suspended enforcement of that same sanction for a one-year probationary period, clearing Balogun to play against Belgium. Belgium’s federation called itself “astonished,” arguing the decision contradicted both the Disciplinary Code and the tournament’s own competition regulations.
As if that decision weren’t controversial enough on its own, it unfolded within an even more damaging context: the one surrounding the decision to modify the sanction. President Trump has since confirmed, publicly and unambiguously, that he personally asked FIFA to review Balogun’s red card, removing any doubt about his attempt to influence the organization’s decision. FIFA, for its part, has insisted that the Disciplinary Committee acted independently, but its own public explanation, published a day after the ruling and in direct response to criticism, never addresses whether the president’s outreach had any bearing on the outcome or its timing.
This is where a sporting governance system meets its own defining test. A disciplinary body’s authority does not rest only on whether it has the power to grant an exception. It rests on whether the exception can be seen, by every competitor and every federation, as the product of the same reasoning applied to all. The moment a decision becomes entangled, even by appearance alone, with outside political influence that, moreover, not every nation possesses equally, the architecture of equal opportunity to perform, the very thing Fair Competition aspires to guarantee, is placed under strain. It does not require proof of impropriety to produce this effect. Doubt, once introduced into a system that depends on being perceived as uniform, does its own quiet damage.
The underlying dispute, in fact, has already surfaced publicly as an institutional controversy, not as an unanswered question. UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable,” and stated: “A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted.” FIFA responded with a detailed thirteen-point statement, clarifying that the Committee did not overturn the referee’s red card but rather formally incorporated it into its own July 5 ruling, and only afterward suspended its enforcement under Article 27, a power that, the institution maintains, is prohibited by no provision of either the Disciplinary Code or the tournament regulations. UEFA and FIFA, then, do not disagree for lack of information but because of opposing readings of the same rule, already explained in detail by both sides: for UEFA, the automaticity of the sanction places it, by design, outside the Committee’s discretionary reach; for FIFA, Article 27 lets it intervene on any sanction it has imposed, automatic or not. No outside authority has yet resolved which reading prevails. But FIFA itself merely asserts that the measure is “not unprecedented,” without citing a single specific case from the qualifiers it alludes to, a precedent that asks to be believed rather than verified.
In conclusion, this is not simply a case of outside political influence, or of appearance versus reality. Discretion, exercised within an institution’s own jurisdiction, consistently and transparently, is a legitimate feature of any disciplinary code; rigid automaticity is not, in itself, more just than proportionate judgment. FIFA, to its credit, did offer public, detailed reasoning, something UEFA disputes in substance, not in existence. But that reasoning explains the legal “how” and “why” of the decision without touching what matters most to public trust: how extraordinary this exception really was, and whether a head of state’s outreach had anything to do with this sanction, among so many similar ones, being the one chosen for it.
That is the deeper lesson of institutional Fair Play: FIFA is not asked to be perfect, it is asked to pursue excellence with the same seriousness it demands of its athletes. The architecture of a competition is tested not only in how it treats athletes, or in whether it can explain its rules, but in whether that explanation arrives before doubt does, or only after.
(For a fuller treatment of this distinction, see my article “Democracy, Meritocracy & DEI: A Perspective from Fair Competition,” Dribbli Ethosport, 2025.)
A note on method: the account above rests on public information, including the FIFA Disciplinary Committee’s thirteen-point statement of July 6, UEFA’s official statement, and reporting from ESPN and POLITICO. The call between the two presidents is no longer merely reported: President Trump has confirmed it directly, according to ESPN. What remains unconfirmed is whether that outreach had any bearing on the ruling or its timing, a question FIFA’s own statement does not address directly.