Terrible process, lads...
The suspension of Folarin Balogun's ban may right a wrong, but the apparently arbitrary way it's been done risks damaging the integrity of the World Cup
The product is the football.
Which you might think would be obvious, but it really seems not to be. Football has been functioning as a professional concern for 140 years. It is the most popular sport in the world. It is loved for what it is, for the football. And yet football’s administrators, like the administrators of so many sports, seem obsessed with the idea that everybody is suddenly about to go off football. So they offer sops: deafening pre-match ‘entertainment’ – which in Dallas seemed to consist of two blonde women in cowgirl garb doing a live-action QVC presentation; half-time shows; musical interludes; and stars.
Make sure, beyond all else, that famous people are associated with the game and show them obsessively in the stands: Morgan Freeman, Penelope Cruz, David Beckham, countless people who seem to be celebrities in the US but who don’t register elsewhere…
And make sure there are famous people on the pitch. If Cristiano Ronaldo gets himself sent off against Ireland in qualifying and so incurs a suspension that would keep him out of the first two games of the tournament, overturn it! He’s banned… and now he isn’t. Perhaps this is the beauty of the magic ball Gianni Infantino keeps going on about. (Although that of course meant that Moises Caicedo and Nicolás Otamendi also had to have bans overturned as part of a general amnesty, just so it wasn’t quite so obvious what Fifa were doing.) But bans are good; bans maintain order; bans, in the long term, protect players by disincentivising violent and dangerous acts.
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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.
Jon Hotten’s brilliant book, Vinciness, is available now in paperback. Order it here. Originally produced as a limited edition hardback, it uses James Vince’s career as a meditation on sport, fragility and frailty. Heartily recommended.
Issue Sixty-One of The Blizzard is available here, featuring Brazil, Argentina, Belgium’s first international coach, a photo-essay from Uzbekistan, memories of Scotland in 1998, a look at Curaçao and Cape Verde and an investigation into what went wrong for Serbia-Montenegro in 2006.
On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we continue our series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.
World Cup Wednesdays continue on the It Was What It Was Patreon, with 2018 and weekly live World Cup Q&As . Members can binge all four 1966 episodes now. Join up here.
On Libero, we continue our coverage from the World Cup. Listen here.
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With Ronaldo, the precedent was set for suspension of Folarin Balogun’s ban. There are two discrete issues here. Firstly, the decision to send him off was a bad one. In challenging for a ball in the USA’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina his foot landed on Tarik Muharemović’s calf. It looked horrible and was no doubt extremely painful, but it was also very obviously an accident. He hadn’t lunged towards an opponent or overstretched; there was so sense in which he’d neglected his duty of care to an opponent. VAR in this tournament has been wildly erratic and this was another instance, made worse by the fact that the official in question, the Venezuela Juan Soto, seemed to misapply the protocols by viewing the incident in slow motion.
