The Folarin Balogun Red Card Brouhaha Is A Vintage FIFA Disaster

Just a day after FIFA rescind Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night’s round of 16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, the story keeps on rolling thanks to FIFA’s innate FIFA-ness. On Monday, the Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement about the whole mess, which has raised the twin specters of corruption and incompetence.

The RBFA’s statement is a doozy. The association claims it learned of Balogun’s un-suspension not from FIFA itself, but through the media reports coming from the tournament press on Sunday. Likely confused and certainly more than a little angry, the RBFA sent a letter to FIFA “requesting a copy of the decision, an explanation of the process that had been followed, and setting out its position regarding the applicable regulations.” This is a reasonable request to make, and though FIFA failed to communicate to Belgium the results of their decision about Balogun prior to it leaking to the press, FIFA could have turned that into a minor oversight by simply sharing its reasoning with the RBFA. Not so fast, my friends! Because this is FIFA, things got very weird after Belgium sent that their request for clarity. The next part of the RBFA statement reads:

As its only response, FIFA sent a letter to the RBFA stating that it considered this correspondence to constitute an appeal, that a judge had been appointed, and that the RBFA had only a few hours to complete that appeal. No information whatsoever was provided by FIFA.