Foul? Play?

Fairness on the pitch and elsewhere...

I want to begin by saying that I watched the match live and didn’t think that it was a foul worthy of a red card when it happened. I still don’t. Balogun should have received a yellow, I think that is indisputable. But there was no ill-intent, no premeditated malice that typically precedes a red card suspension.

I should also say that I am a huge fan of futbol, and have married into a soccer-oriented family, with both wife and sister-in-law having played collegiately and well into their adult lives. And while I have settled into support of the USMNT, it comes after my deep appreciation for and love of women’s soccer, the Kansas City Current, and the USWNT. So, I support this USMNT fully, and know that the fervor for them comes, at least in part, from the incredible success of the women’s team. I relish that a little bit.

All those disclaimers aside, it is going to be much harder to be gleeful in tonight’s match against Belgium, because of the clear signs of corruption that are difficult to explain, justify, or ignore. I hope for a win for the USMNT, but at what cost? All of this leaves me feeling a lot like I felt during the 4th of July…conflicted and sad.

Balogun, as I see it, has no real way out of this. He could choose not to play, but that gains him little. After all, most everyone I have seen felt the red card was unwarranted and Belgium will, perhaps rightly, feel like they have been cheated. But if he plays and is wildly successful then an asterisk will be next to his stats for so many. He plays and commits another foul, even accidentally, and he’s labeled a “dirty player.” There’s almost no way for him to just be a soccer player and I don’t think that the shame of this ought to land on him.

The great irony is that a President who fought hard to eliminate the 14^th Amendment that declares Balogun eligible to play on this team is the same one who used cronyism and corruption to get this red card suspension suspended, because everything is all about how he feels at any moment. It would be one thing if it had just been reduced to a yellow, or eliminated altogether as a mistake on the part of the referee, but to “suspend a suspension” is deeply troubling and sets a standard that the rules count, but in different ways for different people. And that is as wrong as the initial call. In fact, it’s worse.

Should this surprise us coming from this administration? Surely not. This is pretty obviously the exact way that the President views things. It is precisely how he has ruined any number of things – a “peaceful transfer of power,” the entire celebration of the semiquincentennial, even the government as a whole, anyone remember DOGE? It isn’t just incompetency or corruption; it is a complete disregard for anything resembling integrity. It is power gained through coercion, dishonesty, and unprincipled bullying. It is unprecedented financial corruption, covered thoroughly here (as usual) by Heather Cox Richardson, complete with credible evidence of fraud and malfeasance of all kinds, all enriching his family to the tune of billions. Winning, in this MAGA ethos – even the appearance of winning – is all that matters. And the display of this in the most powerful position in the nation has given credence to it as an acceptable ethos to hold. It is not.

This is such a dangerous idea to let grow. It is a poison that infects everything, as it already has much of our politics. No longer concerned with common good, the focus is entirely on the next election, on winning at all costs, shown in the salacious and ludicrous ads we saw here in Oklahoma for the Governor’s race. It is money tainting everything from elections to college sports, to name just a couple. And we don’t have a red card for it, save the voices we all have and the ways that we endorse or critique such stuff, which we should at every opportunity…including this one.

I don’t know how Balogun will see the field tonight, though I assume he will. Maybe he starts, maybe he comes in as a sub. Maybe, though I think this every unlikely, he doesn’t play at all. Would that resolve the fairness debate? Maybe. You could even take the position that none of this has been in his hands, he (and the team) is just reacting to the decisions made about him. All he can do is to go and play soccer.

And, to go back to my original disclaimer, I don’t think it was a fair call in the first place. So, where does fairness lie? Do you repair one unfair thing with another one? Are we wrong to think that we can ever arrive at a completely objective, so-called “perfect” system of officiating games that involve human beings? We are, after all, notorious for defying perfection, aren’t we?

All of this leaves me very conflicted going into the game tonight, which I will definitely watch. I will cheer loudly for the USMNT, and I will also hope, pray, and work for a world in which fairness is a goal, not something to be avoided, ignored, or bought. We don’t have to like how Balogun received his eligibility. We can acknowledge that there are layers of attacks on fairness in this one situation. We don’t have to like how it seems that some players/teams, in many sports, seem to get favoritism, as long as we also note that the vast majority of the time we don’t think this is true for OUR team, whoever that is.

What we can do is acknowledge the complexities and imperfections of sports and recognize how those same issues are present in everything else in life in which human beings are involved. The question is not how we make things “perfect,” not even as perfect as we can make them. That will never be the case, in sport or in life. The question is how do we react when things are unfair? How do we confess and embrace accountability when mistakes are made? How do we learn from errors and try to make a better environment? Fairness, friends, is always on the horizon, never in our rear-view mirror.