The Donald J. Trump Electric Kool-Aid Tangerine-Flake American-Flag-Blue World Cup

by David Benjamin

“Overturn this!” — The Belgian soccer team

MADISON, Wis.—The rumor isn’t true that Gianni Infantino has sent the World Cup trophy back to the shop to super-glue a gold bas-relief of Donald Trump’s scowl over the part of the globe where the Pacific Ocean used to be.

Right now, this re-design is only an Oval Office executive order yet to be approved by FIFA, soccer’s governing body. Widely regarded as the most corrupt sports organization in the world, FIFA has quietly indicated that only a fat cut from Trump’s meme-coin skim will land the Donald’s kisser on their prize.

Although FIFA Capo dei Capi Infantino previously gifted Trump the first (and last) “FIFA Peace Prize,” the Donald was oblivious to soccer’s World Cup—largely staged in the United States—’til he saw video involving a former anchor baby, U.S. forward Folarin Balogun. Here’s veteran soccer reporter Bill Saporito’s account: “…Balogun was red carded for a foul that the on-field referee clearly believed was no big deal and the V.A.R. crew decided was a capital crime (or at least worth a one-game suspension). The decision, after further review, was that the American … had somehow decided to hack his Bosnian opponent while falling backward and trying to find his own balance. Neither player appeared to think it any more than a random encounter …”

In sum, this was a classic bad call familiar to every fan of every sport since time immemorial. Among the notorious examples is the “NOLA no-call” for unflagged pass interference in the 2018 Super Bowl, denying victory to the Saints. Even more infamously, there’s an actual book (Nobody’s Perfect) about umpire Jim Joyce blowing a call at first base and killing Armando Galarraga’s perfect game with two outs in the ninth inning. In heartbreakers like these, the cross the fan must bear is that there’s nothing you can do. “It is,” to upchuck the cliché, “what it is.”

Particularly in soccer, it might well be what it is, but the question no one seems able to answer, about those stupid yellow and red cards waving above the pitch, is: “If it is what it is, then what the hell is it?”

To get a sense of what “it” was in the Folarin kerfuffle, I consulted Wikipedia, where the entry on fouls and colored cards goes on for almost 2,500 words. By comparison, the NCAA explains one of its most complicated rules, the definition and punishment of “targeting,” in just over 400 terse, legalistic words. Both “targeting” in football and the more nebulous range of red-card “fouls” in soccer are deemed “judgment” calls by game officials, subject to video review. It was the guys in the video booth, not the players or refs on the field, who decided on the expulsion of Folarin Balogun and aroused Donald Trump’s interest in the World Cup after three weeks and 82 games had elapsed.

It takes Wikipedia, by the way, another thousand words to slog through an explanation of video refereeing in soccer.
The real answer to “What the hell is it?” lurks in the details. FIFA’s list of the sorts of sins that might trigger the red-card banishment of an offending player include “excessive force,” “carelessness,” “recklessness,” making one’s body “unnaturally bigger,” “dissent,” “offensive, insulting or abusive language,” e.g., trash talk, “a deliberate trick,” e.g. the hidden-ball trick in baseball, the head-fake in basketball, the Statue of Liberty play in single-wing football, “entering, re-entering or deliberately leaving the field of play without the referee’s permission,” “unsporting behavior,” “simulation,” “excessive celebration” including “removing one’s shirt or covering one’s face with the shirt,”, e.g. U.S. player Brandi Chastain ripping off her shirt after winning the ’99 Women’s World Cup, “biting or spitting,” “violent conduct,” and—this is my favorite—“any other offense not previously mentioned in the Laws.”

This last category ought to, but doesn’t officially include “bad acting.” Fully aware of the vagueness of soccer’s crimes—“carelessness,” “violent conduct”—players typically react to being knocked on their ass by collapsing to the grass, clutching a tender body part (knee, head. nuts) and writhing in the throes of A.E.Housman’s athlete dying young ’til they hear a whistle toot or glimpse a card unsheathed. Suddenly, the cripple pops to his feet fit as a fiddle.

The maze of ambiguities with which soccer refs must cope stands in stark—almost ludicrous—contrast to the simplicity of the game itself. Soccer is the best sandlot sport ever conceived. It requires no equipment at all, not even a ball. In many of the impoverished regions too poor to support a Dick’s, a pile of rags rolled together and tied up with a few yards of twine will suffice to kick around. The goals? Two sticks shoved into the dirt on each end of a makeshift pitch. And sporting apparel? C’mon, man! You can play soccer barefoot.

Everyone loves soccer because everyone has played it, on playgrounds and fields, on sandlots and asphalt. I played “two-line soccer” during recess in fourth grade—in the Wisconsin winter—possibly before a single grownup in America had conceived of the regimented chaos of a “youth soccer” league. Soccer’s tragedy is that it has been expropriated by oligarchs and corporations, by dictators and mobsters. The best soccer team in France doesn’t have its name, Paris St.-Germain, embroidered on its jerseys. Every PSG player wears an ad for Qatar Airways.

Nothing typifies the corruption at the top of “association soccer” more vividly than the bromance of Godfather Don Trump and “Johnny Babe” Infantino. Two made guys without scruples get on the phone, screw over the refs and get away with it because, in the words of Johnny Castle, “They’re rich and they’re mean.”

American fans are familiar with occasional amendments in their sports—like moving the hashmarks on football fields or outlawing the spitball. Normally, these are discussed and tested, sometimes for years, before becoming law or being repealed. One of baseball’s quirks is that every ballpark has ground rules unique to its contours. At Fenway Park, there’s a yellow line painted on the Green Monster that designates as a home run a ball hit to its right but, on the left, merely a base hit. At Wrigley Field, if a fielder can’t dig out a ball that’s been hit into the ivy that flourishes on the bricks of the outfield wall, the hitter has to stop at second base. And don’t get me started about the right-field short porch in Yankee Stadium.

In virtually every game people play, its legislators adapt—to the improvement of equipment and the growth of technology, to the connivances of coaches seeking an advantage, to the physical evolution of the athletes themselves and to the need to keep fans attentive, entertained and non-violent. Every sports organization evaluates its personnel, notes its errors, reads trends, feels the pulse of its followers and, often too subtly for most folks to notice, tweaks its rules.

Cicero once said, “The times change, and we with them.”

But not soccer. Its rules are stagnant. Its technology is dysfunctional. Its fans, given no choices and no relief from 0-0 ties and anticlimactic shootouts, are eerily patient until, now and then, they rise up, run the streets and kill one another.
Soccer’s silver lining is the World Cup. Every four years, the essential “people’s game” throws a giant party and briefly transcends the corruption of its overseers, the pusillanimity of its coaches, and the obscene salaries of its millionaire stars. This year, it swept the troubled Americas with a healing eruption of drunken camaraderie and melting-pot brotherhood.
But this is only an interlude.

The abiding malaise of FIFA will, alas, ooze from the final scene of this quadrennial respite. Presenting the winning team’s trophy (if he doesn’t try to keep it for himself) is the guy who has “the right to do whatever I want,” who got on the phone with his buddy and made a deal to bag the rules—the crypto grifter whom sportswriter Rick Reilly calls “Commander in Cheat.”