This all just sucks…

by bk , Close enough, Monday, July 06, 2026, 10:25 (16 days ago) @ Jack
edited by bk, Monday, July 06, 2026, 10:38

This US team has looked good. And it’s been fun to follow their run.

But now, if they beat Belgium, it will feel like it is with an asterisk. It will feel unearned or undeserved in some sense.

I get that the red card on Balogun was very controversial and may have included a breach of VAR protocols. But soccer has lived with the consequences of bad calls forever. A red card has always meant an additional suspension. Yet for reasons that aren’t clear, the US gets seemingly special treatment. A reprieve like this has never happened in tournament regardless of whether a call was any good.

I’ll admit to having a natural bent toward following the rules even when they result in unfair outcomes. My job includes certain compliance responsibilities, and I work hard to get people to understand that our default should be to follow policy even if it leads to bad results. I advise people that we can’t change policy in the middle of a situation. We can change it after the fact, but once an issue has arisen, we have to follow policy.

I also take the position that exceptions to policies should only be made in circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated because one you make an exception, you have to make it in other instances that are the basically the same.

This situation is just painful for me. I think the right way to handle this for FIFA would be to acknowledge the problems associated with this red card, but stand by the consequences of it. They don’t even have to say that the red card was wrong. But the long-standing rules place these decisions in the hands of a single ref. This leads to inconsistencies in how similar situations are called. This is a normal part of sport and is something all teams and players playing multiple games over time will both benefit from and be harmed by.

Balogun’s foul was not remarkable. It was a foul. Over 1,000 instances of the same foul, you would likely get a range of outcomes, many of which would include a red card. And if you looked at a set of 1,000 red cards given, I doubt this one would register as the most egregious, let alone some outlier justifying unprecedented after-the-fact action.

But here we are. The US team is the beneficiary of an action never before taken in the World Cup and one that goes contrary to decades of international, professional, and amateur soccer matches. Because there is nothing particularly remarkable about the red card apart from it being controversial in a seemingly normal sense, this reprieve feels unearned. And if it positively influences the outcome of the Belgium game, that sense of “unearned” will carry over to the victory in a way that will make it a little less joyful for me.

That has nothing to do with Trump, by the way. If he’d never called, it would still feel off.

So this all just sucks.