A Trump Card At The World Cup

We admit right from the start here that we are still struggling. Not just with the tough loss by the US Men’s National Team in the World Cup’s knockout round, but with the whole sport of soccer.

Or as it’s known everywhere else in the world, football.

“Football is Life!” exclaims the character Dani Rojas in the uber-popular Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso.” The character is played by Cristo Fernandez, an actual soccer player turned actor. (And yes, we can’t wait for the show's return this August either.)

But aside from the brief education we’ve gotten courtesy of Richmond A.F.C. and Coach Beard’s indirect recommendation of the treatise on the sport titled “Inverting the Pyramid,” we still don’t understand the offside call.

We do find it amusing that in almost every match in every football league, there is a moment when the referee draws the outline of a screen and then jogs to the sideline to watch… a television.

They call it the VAR, short for Video Assistant Referee (not video-assisted replay, as we first thought). The VAR enters a soccer match for two types of interventions. The first is when the officials operating the video replay room (conveniently sponsored by the technology brand Lenovo) decide that the on-field referee should review a play for a “clear and obvious error.” This is when a jog to a waiting monitor on the side of the field, or the “pitch” as it is correctly called, is called for.

It’s a similar application to sideline instant replay in professional and college football, which is also known as “going under the hood.” We’re not sure why soccer doesn’t feel the need to have the ref shrouded while watching the replay.

The other way VAR makes itself known is for more factual matters. In cases like the aforementioned offside infraction, the VAR can simply relay the correct call to the referee on the field, via the headset they wear during the match.

But the role of the VAR is itself confusing. It isn’t used to review everything in a match, but supposedly only for reviewing four categories of decisions: Goals, Penalty Decisions, Red Cards (ejections for severe penalties), and correcting the mistaken identity of players receiving either Red or the lesser Yellow Cards.

Of course, the 24 hours leading up to last night’s highly anticipated World Cup match between the United States and Belgium, crossed over from being a sports story to a global news story. The Athletic reported that the President of the United States called the President of FIFA to inquire why the Red Card had been given to star US player Folarin Balogun in the previous Wednesday’s match between the United States and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Let's call this what it is: FIFA blew up its own rulebook because the President of the United States picked up the phone. Balogun's red card wasn't even a real-time call — the referee waved play on, and it was VAR that sent him to the monitor, where he issued the card after watching the replay in slow motion. That was openly questioned at the time. FIFA’s protocol is that the use of slow motion in the review shouldn’t determine the severity of the foul. By that standard, Balogun should have received a yellow card instead of the red one given, which automatically suspends the player for the next game.

Then Donald Trump called Gianni Infantino, by his own admission, because he "didn't think it was a foul," and by Sunday the suspension had evaporated. FIFA's disciplinary committee dressed it up as an independent legal process in which the phone call played no role, but nobody outside FIFA's press shop is buying that explanation. Especially since the last time a red card didn’t result in a one-game suspension was in 1962.

Even before the US team’s 1-4 loss Monday night in Seattle, that phone call became the controversy that washed away much of the global goodwill generated by three weeks of World Cup matches played in stadiums across major cities in the United States.

The US will now watch the rest of its own World Cup, played on its own soil, without its national team on the field.

You might understand why other nations, far more soccer-crazed than we are, might feel some sense of justice in the outcome of this particular Monday’s events. That’s not the fault of the team itself, though the consensus is that the USMNT played far below the level they needed to challenge the higher-ranked Belgium team.

The other loser may turn out to be Fox Sports, which had been riding a wave of record viewership for its World Cup coverage. The network’s price tag this year was only $485 million for the rights to carry the English-language coverage of the 104 matches, divided between Fox’s broadcast network and its FS1 cable sports outlet. (The Spanish-language coverage is carried in the US via NBCUniversal’s Telemundo network, both on broadcast and on NBCU’s Peacock streaming app.)

When you compare that to the likely price tag of $1.5 billion to air the 2030 World Cup here (or even to the $2.25 billion that Fox pays each year for NFL rights), this year’s well-received World Cup coverage was already a blockbuster of a bargain.

It will likely still be considered that — when the final match ends in the New Jersey Meadowlands on July 19th.

But likely with fewer viewers than anticipated, given what transpired over the past couple of days.

As a friend who lives “across the pond” put in a half-joking message to us: “Leave it to the ugly Americans to tarnish the beautiful game a bit.”

We defended our nation by reminding our "Eurotrash friend" that we invented trash-talking here in the good old USA, and that we were just getting warmed up.

Turns out we didn't need to. We've got a guy who calls the ref's boss.

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