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The Facts

On July 1, 2026, in the 64th minute of the World Cup Round of 32 match between the United States and Bosnia-Herzegovina, American striker Folarin Balogun stretched for a ball and ended up standing on the ankle of defender Tarik Muharemović. The referee didn't call a foul. Then the VAR intervened, the referee reviewed the footage, and Balogun was shown a straight red card for serious foul play.

Reasonable people disagreed about the call. Former Premier League VAR official Andy Davies said that, in his view, it was not a red card offense. Coach Mauricio Pochettino insisted there was no intent. Weston McKennie pointed out that Lionel Messi had escaped punishment for a similar action earlier in the tournament. The Americans, to their credit, won the match 2-0 with ten players.

If the story had ended there, it would have been a familiar one: a harsh decision, some grumbling, and a star player watching the next match from the bench. FIFA's own rules are unambiguous. Article 10.5 of the World Cup 2026 Competition Regulations states that a player sent off is automatically suspended for the team's next match. Every red card in the tournament had been handled that way. Those are the rules. Dura lex, sed lex.

Then the phone rang.

A call, a reversal, a firestorm

President Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino and asked him to review the red card. He later confirmed this openly, saying he asked for a review because he didn't think it was a foul. He also said he did not know what a red card meant. On Sunday July 5, the day before the game with Belgium, FIFA announced that Balogun's automatic suspension was itself suspended, invoking Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code and placing the striker on a one-year probationary period.

The reaction was immediate. The Royal Belgian Football Association said it was astonished, pointing out that the decision directly contradicted the tournament regulations that had applied to every other player. UEFA said FIFA had crossed a red line and called the decision unprecedented and unjustifiable. When Belgium tried to challenge the reversal, FIFA declared the appeal inadmissible on the grounds that the Belgian federation had no standingn with the decision. The Belgians also reported they were given only a few hours to file, and that FIFA had, unusually, skipped the section on automatic suspensions in the pre-match coordination meeting.

Balogun played. Belgium won 4-1, eliminating the co-hosts from their own World Cup. The result took some of the sting out of the controversy, but it should not distract from what happened. Something more important than a football match was damaged that weekend.

Why the process matters more than the call

Here is the thing about the original red card: it may well have been wrong. Referees make mistakes, and the VAR sometimes turns an innocent collision into a slow-motion "crime scene". But sport, like any institution, has a way of absorbing bad calls. We accept them because we trust the process that produced them: the same rules, applied the same way, to everyone. Once the rules are questioned because someone does not like the outcome, there is a slippery slope.

One of the ways institutions build trust is by agreeing on procedures, norms and values, and then adhering to them. When people see that these procedures are respected, they experience what researchers call procedural justice. When the procedures are altered along the way, an experience of injustice appears, and it tends to run deeper than any single unfavorable outcome.

This is not just intuition. Decades of research back it up. Studies consistently find that people judge institutions less on whether individual decisions go their way and more on whether the decision-making process is fair. Research on university governance found that fair treatment predicted the perceived legitimacy of authorities more strongly than fair outcomes did. A study of governance in post-conflict Nepal found the same pattern: procedural justice mattered more for legitimacy than service delivery or favorable results. A large European study covering more than 30,000 respondents in 27 countries showed that perceptions of procedural fairness feed directly into political trust, and, tellingly, that this effect grows stronger in systems where trust is already fragile.

The research also identifies which ingredients of procedural justice matter most: neutrality, consistency and transparency. Work on legitimacy in security and governance settings found that neutrality and trustworthiness were the components people cared about most when judging whether an authority deserved its power. A study of government rulemaking added a crucial nuance: what damages legitimacy most is not imperfect procedure, but the moment an institution visibly bypasses its own procedural controls.

Measure FIFA's decision against those three ingredients and it fails on every count. It was inconsistent: every other red card in the tournament triggered an automatic ban. It was not neutral: the reversal followed a phone call from the head of state of the host nation, whose team stood to benefit. And it was opaque: an appeal window of a few hours, a rules section quietly omitted from a briefing, and a governing body that treated a federation's request for explanation as a formality to be dismissed.

The cost of bending the rules

This legitimacy is why players walk off the pitch after a red card instead of arguing indefinitely. It is why federations accept defeats, why fans keep watching, and why the whole institution of competitive sport holds together. That legitimacy is built slowly, through thousands of decisions applied consistently, and it can be spent very quickly.

There is a certain irony in how it ended. Balogun played, the United States lost anyway, and FIFA gained nothing except a governance scandal. But the damage is not measured in one result. The next time FIFA insists a rule is a rule, somewhere a federation, a player or a fan will remember the weekend in July when it turned out that rules are negotiable if the right person makes a phone call.

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback, as the Flemish/Dutch saying goes. In Seattle, it left at a gallop.

What does it mean?

Rules, norms and values matter. They are not decoration, and they are not obstacles to be managed when they become inconvenient. They are the agreement that makes everything else possible: the shared understanding that lets 48 nations compete, lets billions watch, and lets a defeated team shake hands and go home believing the contest was real.

That agreement only works if it is respected and protected, especially when respecting it is costly. Anyone can follow the rules when the rules suit them. The test of an institution comes at the moment when a rule produces an outcome it does not like, when the star player is suspended, when the powerful friend calls, when bending just once seems harmless. That is precisely the moment the rule exists for.

The lesson of the Balogun affair reaches well beyond football. Every organization, from a governing body to a company to a classroom, runs on the same quiet contract: we agreed on how decisions get made, and we stick to it. Protect that contract and people will accept even the decisions that hurt. Break it once, visibly, for the benefit of the powerful, and every future decision arrives under suspicion.

Leadership

This places a particular responsibility on leaders. Leaders need to refrain from influencing and bending the rules as they see fit. Every time they do, they erode trust not only in themselves but in the organization they stand for. It follows that organizations should take this seriously when selecting leaders, and should train them on it. Respect for procedure is not a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It is a core leadership competence.

Sometimes a rule genuinely needs to be adapted. Circumstances change, and no set of regulations foresees everything. But when that happens, three conditions apply: there must be a very good reason, the exception should be temporary or limited in scope, and the decision must be made in full transparency. A rule changed openly, with clear justification, can strengthen an institution. A rule bent quietly, after a phone call, does the opposite. Power is not justification.

Peter Anthonisse has called this "power maturity": dealing with power in a mature way. The word power is important here. It is not because someone has the power to bend the rules that they should. And it is not because they have the power to bend the rules that doing so comes without consequences. Leaders get their authority from leading by example. The moment they place themselves above the procedures they expect others to follow, they have not demonstrated their power. They have spent it.

Rules are easy to defend when nothing is at stake. Institutions are judged by what they do when something is. So are leaders.

Sources and further reading

Research

Fielder et al. (2022), A crisis of legitimacy? The importance of procedural justice in frontline private security provision, Policing and Society
Fisk et al. (2017), Pathways to Institutional Legitimacy in Postconflict Societies: Perceptions of Process and Performance in Nepal, Governance
Główczewski et al. (2022), (In)justice in academia: procedural fairness, students' academic identification, and perceived legitimacy of university authorities, Higher Education
Hough et al. (2010), Procedural Justice, Trust, and Institutional Legitimacy, Policing
Mazerolle et al. (2013), Procedural justice and police legitimacy: a systematic review of the research evidence, Journal of Experimental Criminology
Ruder et al. (2020), Procedural Fairness and the Legitimacy of Agency Rulemaking, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Schnaudt et al. (2021), Distributive and Procedural Justice and Political Trust in Europe
Walters et al. (2018), Procedural justice perceptions, legitimacy beliefs, and compliance with the law: a meta-analysis, Journal of Experimental Criminology

The Red Card That Wasn't: What FIFA's Balogun Decision Teaches Us About Trust