INGLEWOOD — On a May evening in 1980, 19-year-old Diego Maradona created a performance at Wembley Stadium so brilliant, so incomprehensible that London’s Sunday Times a few days later felt the need to devote a full page in its “A” section to it as if to confirm, “Yes, he really did that.”
The beauty of soccer is its art.
The sport offers a freedom and space that allows its true artists to go to, to take the game wherever their imagination leads them. Today the genius of Pele and Cruyff, Best and Zidane is available on YouTube like masterpieces lining the walls of the Louvre. But for decades, the nights like Maradona had against England seemed so fantastical that they could be dismissed as myth. Genius had to be verified.
We began this World Cup believing in the unbelievable. The allure of the World Cup is that it allows us to witness genius in real time, to follow Messi or Ronaldo, Mbappe or Yamal to those places the rest of us can’t comprehend. For a month, it’s like we’re standing on the paint-splattered floor of Jackson Pollock’s barn on Long Island’s South Fork, sitting next to Dylan in Greenwich Village as he scribbled out “Like A Rolling Stone” on hotel stationery, in the minds of Baldwin, Morrison and Kahlo.
The World Cup also came with a promise: that the confines of the game’s green canvas are sacred, that a match will be impacted only by its players’ labor and imagination and not outside forces.
Donald Trump and FIFA broke that promise, shattered it without so much as a shrug.
FIFA’s decision, under pressure from Trump, to allow U.S. forward Folarin Balogun to play in a Round of 16 match against Belgium despite picking up a red card and an automatic one-match suspension in Team USA’s previous match, forever tainted this World Cup.
An “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision,” said UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.
This record shattering World Cup has been full of special moments, both big and small, humorous and poignant; Scottish fans doing the seemingly impossible and drinking Boston dry, Norway rowing its way into the tournament quarterfinals, England midfield superstar Jude Bellingham stopping in the mixed zone to answer a disabled Venezuelan reporter’s questions in Spanish after his teammates rushed past him.
But this World Cup ultimately will not be remembered for those moments, for the ageless wonder of Argentina’s Lionel Messi, the scoring of France’s Kylian Mbappe and Norway’s Erling Haaland, the end-to-end dominance of Bellingham, but for the naked transactionalism of Trump and FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
How Trump and Infantino took this special summer and made it radioactive.
“When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians,” UEFA said, “the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.”
It wasn’t enough that FIFA, a tax-exempt organization in the U.S. since the 1994 World Cup, will pocket a $13 billion profit from the tournament while leaving host cities and their taxpayers billions in debt from tournament-related expenses. Infantino and Trump sold out the integrity of the game with the Balogun decision.
“Who overturns this decision then and when? And on what grounds? How far does this go now? This is strange for me,” England manager Thomas Tuchel said. “Where does this start and where does this end?”
It’s a question that many athletes hoping to compete in the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games must be asking themselves as well.
The World Cup said goodbye to Southern California with Spain’s dramatic 2-1 quarterfinal victory against Belgium Friday afternoon at SoFi Stadium. But the toxic stench Trump and Infantino created will linger in Los Angeles and continue to hover over LA 2028.
If you’re an athlete from another country competing in the 2028 Games, how could you possibly have any confidence that Trump, emboldened by FIFA’s caving in the Balogun affair, won’t pressure the International Olympic Committee to reinstate an American sprinter after a false start, upgrade a U.S. score on the balance beam or waive a positive drug test by a Team USA athlete?
How can any foreign athlete have faith that the playing field in Los Angeles will be level? That the results will be decided on the field of play and not by a phone call from the Oval Office?
No one has ever confused the I in IOC with standing for integrity. This is an IOC that just this week cleared the way for Russian athletes to compete in the Los Angeles Games by lifting 2 1/2 year suspension of Russia despite its continued attacks on neighboring Ukraine in the bloodiest war Europe has seen since World War II. At least IOC president Kirsty Coventry will no longer have to answer inconvenient questions about the perceived hypocrisy in some parts of banning Russia while the U.S. and Israel continue their war with Iran.
The IOC reversal came just hours after Russian missiles struck residential buildings in Kyiv, an attack that literally hit too close to home for Wimbledon semi-finalist Marta Kostyuk.
“On Monday they ruined like four streets of residential buildings,” Kostyuk told reporters. “It was like five kilometers away from where my parents live. Again, another difficult night and a lot of dead people, innocent people, kids. It’s not easy. I try to be aware of everything that’s going on.”
And now we have to question everything about this World Cup. We can debate the merits of Balogun’s red card. “I think first of all, to be very clear, that it (Balogun) was not a red card,” said Tuchel, who went on to point out that there are missed and blown calls in every match.
And Trump and Infantino have forced us to question all of them.
Why wasn’t Messi shown a red card for a similar foul to that of Balogun’s earlier in the tournament? Did the VAR official, like the match referee, miss it? Or is Messi untouchable? Why was an Egyptian goal against Argentina called back in the Round of 16?
Where does this start and where does this end?