It was FIFA’s corruption that stunned people, not President Donald Trump’s. The chief executive’s contempt for rules is now taken for granted. What astonished the world was that soccer’s global governing body crumbled in the face of his pressure.
To recap, the American striker Folarin Balogun was sent off for jumping on the ankle of a Bosnian player. Under FIFA rules, a player who gets a red card is banned from playing in the following game.
Trump was unfamiliar with this rule and, indeed, seemed not to know what a red card was. “I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can’t play in the next game. I said, boy, that’s big, you know.” Typically, he called FIFA to complain and — perhaps less typically — FIFA reinstated Balogun.
The entire soccer world was outraged, including almost every prominent current or former player. Sport, even more than politics, depends on a disinterested application of the rules. I was almost alone in not being shocked, because I start from the presumption that all international bureaucracies are corrupt.
In this regard, at least, I heartily agree with Trump — or at any rate with the Bannonite Trump of 2017 who went to the United Nations to make the case for national sovereignty, and who liked to tell his rallies that “the future belongs to patriots, not globalists”.
Corruption is an inescapable feature of supranational technocracies, from the European Union to the International Olympic Committee, from the United Nations to FIFA. Not because they contain venal people. I mean, sure, they have their share of shysters, but so does every organization. Their problem is simply that no one holds them to account. A business answers to its suppliers, its customers, and its shareholders. A national legislature answers to its electorate. Global officials answer only to themselves.
People sometimes ask what causes corruption, but that is like asking what causes poverty. Both were part of the primordial order. If, by corruption, you mean the systematic looting of state resources by the people in power, that has been normal since the first Bronze Age slave empires. The real question is what reduces corruption, just as the real question is what reduces poverty.
What reduces corruption most effectively is a system of checks on people in office. Independent magistrates, regular elections, transparent government, equality before the law. The reason the U.S. is less corrupt than most of the places where its inhabitants originated is that it has these things. FIFA does not, and cannot.
Which brings me to the real scandal. Not FIFA’s cowardice, but Trump’s bullying and the fact that it no longer surprises anyone. Once again, Trump has behaved like a sunglasses-wearing, bemedalled Third World autocrat. Not content with questioning the decision — as if the world had not witnessed Balogun’s foul — he alleged corruption, claiming that the Brazilian referee was “a little bit suspect, if you check his past”.
There was a time when we would have been scandalized by such behavior from the leader of the free world, but those days are past. Nor are we shocked any longer by the way everyone has to pretend to go along with him. Trumpian influencers dropped their customary disdain for soccer and went into “cry harder, Europe” mode.
Not just the online crazies, either. “I admit that I’m not the biggest soccer fan, but I’m glad President Trump urged FIFA to do the right thing,” posted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), in the flesh, a perfectly clever and civilized man. “I wish liberals could put their country ahead of their politics just once, but I guess that’s asking too much.”
Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House’s World Cup task force, echoed the president’s slur against the referee, claiming it was “highly suspicious that there was a referee who had been investigated for match-fixing previously.” In fact, as a Brazilian journalist pointed out, the referee had participated in the investigation as a witness, not a suspect.
DONALD TRUMP IS A THIRD WORLDIST AT HEART
Needless to say, the effect of all this was to unite the entire world against the USA for the next game. That’s right: People were actually cheering for Belgium, whose players mockingly mimicked Trump’s YMCA dance as they celebrated their thumping 4–1 win. That, too, is something we have all got used to: the utter lack of concern among Trump supporters at the way he has burned through decades of accumulated international goodwill.
It is a grim metaphor. The world is playing on U.S. soil, expecting an impartial application of the rules. Trump, not knowing or not caring what he does, makes a mockery of those rules. The world resents and remembers. Thus does American prestige end.