Red Cards, Corruption and the Erosion of Civil Society or Balogun Should Sit

I am not a soccer fan. I am such not a soccer fan that I refer to the sport, known as football in the rest of the world, as soccer. I am a sports fan, however, and I love international competitions. No matter the sport, it is always fun to watch nations come together, to the extent that they can, and have a good time watching meaningless games. It provides a nice break from pretty much the entirety of the rest of the world. I am an unironic and unabashed fan of the Olympics, anything the incompetents in the hockey world manage to scrape together as an international competition, and the World Cup. The problem with that fandom, however, is that most of these organizations are deeply corrupt, and corrupt in ways that make it hard to ignore and harder on civil society. Which brings us to the saga of the red card.

For those that do not know, arguably the best player on the American national soccer team was given a red card during their last game. A red card is for an especially egregious foul and it results in the player being sent off, his team being unable to replace him (so they play with fewer players than starting number), and that player not being able to play in the next game. Now, I am not at all qualified to say if the red card was deserved. As far as I can tell, there are three general categories of foul in soccer: “why are you flopping, you big baby”, “wait, that’s not legal even in the NFL”, and “what the hell— not even hockey lets you get away with that.” I have only ever seen cards handed out for the first category, which tells you all you need to know about my ability to referee a soccer match. But I have seen no one in the soccer world argue that the red card was deserved, and the player in question, Folarin Balogun (a birthright citizen, I might add) handled himself with complete class during and after the incident. However, there is generally no appeals process for overturning bad red card decisions, meaning the United States was set to play an elimination game without arguably its best player.

And then FIFA, soccer’s world governing body and the organization running the World Cup, intervened.

They delayed the suspension until next year, meaning that Balogun can play in the elimination game. They did this the day before the match was supposed to start (Monday evening, the day I am writing this post), meaning the US’s opponent, Belgium, had been practicing and strategizing for a squad missing Balogun and have pretty much no time to properly prepare for a US team with him. The action is almost unprecedented — Ronaldo, a superstar soccer player, was granted a similar reprieve, but that was before the World Cup started. Apparently, the rule used to lift the suspension is not an entirely great justification for the action. And more importantly, Trump called the head of FIFA at least once and maybe as many as three times. The process was completely corrupt, in other words, and that leaves decent fans in something of a bind.

Given the corruption of FIFA, and given how it kowtows to strongmen and wanna be strongmen like Trump (remember, this organization invented a “peace prize” to give Trump when he whined about the Nobel organization failing to give his warmongering self a Nobel Peace Prize. Subtle, FIFA ain’t.), I half expected this outcome, especially since the wider soccer world pretty much believed that the red card should not have been given in the first place. But the soccer world also plays by the same set of rules: red cards are final, no appeals. It is not fair, exactly, but it is within the normal way the game is played. Wanting to believe that two wrongs make a right in this case, especially since they actually arguably do, is a bad thought to encourage. I am not a believer in the slippery slope, generally. Gay marriage did not lead to marrying farm animals, as I was assured would happen. But while the slope is not always slippery, it is often subject to erosion.

The danger of corruption is less the individual acts — though those should not be minimized — but the slow process by which the corrupt, if allowed to, destroy the social contract. Police do not stop crime. In their defense, they are not designed to stop crime, except in the crudest sense that the specter of punishment may deter some people who would otherwise give in to temptation or the worse angels of their nature. Crime is prevented, to paraphrase Agatha Christie, by the little cop we all carry in our heads. It is that cop, that guardian of decency and social cohesion, that prevents us from carrying out crimes and misdemeanors. Most people, even in disasters, do the right thing not because there is a cop watching but because they want to do the right thing, even, especially, in hard times. Corruption weakens that little cop.

Corruption turns good people into suckers. If the corruption is widespread enough and rewarded often enough, then normal people feel more and more pressure to excuse, ignore, or even participate in the corruption. Why do the right thing when doing the right thing is never rewarded and doing the wrong thing is? Why play by the rules when the people who make and enforce the rules do not? It is a compelling argument, and sometimes it is correct. But it erodes civil society. By making people question the value of decency and honesty and fairness, it weakens a society’s ability to demonstrate any of the three. And a society that has a lack of any of those elements, much less all three, is a broken wreck of a society where those with any power, no matter how little or transitory, abuse it for personal benefit. It is a society that cannot experiment or build or even maintain law and order.

This red card issue is not an important issue in the grand scheme of things. But it is a symptom of a larger culture of corruption and impunity that has been eating away at the foundation of America, of arguably the democratic world, since the 1980s. When CEOs are not held responsible for their actions, when firms are allowed to manipulate stock prices by buying their own shares, when companies can steal the entirety of human creative output and then claim that the resulting product should not be held liable for its output, when cops can get away with violating rights under qualified immunity, when presidents can bend the rules of sport to make themselves feel better about being in charge — why should anyone follow any rule? Why should anyone think that the ground they stand upon is not going to rot away and leave them falling and exposed?

You will be reading this after the game has been played. Such are the flows of newsletters — I am not going to swamp your inbox with a rumination about red cards and societal collapse — so you will likely already know that my hope has been dashed. But I hope it nonetheless — I hope that the United States Men’s National Team decides to sit, of its own accord, Balogun. I doubt it will happen, especially given that the USMNT coach has been defending the decision since it came down, but it would be the right thing to do. Not because the red card was correctly handed out — I am convinced by the soccer media that it was not. But because allowing two wrongs to make right just increases the odds of people placing more wrongs into the world. In the short term, it feels good. But in the long term, it eats away at the sense of community and fair play that all societies need to exist and excel. The USMNT could be heroes if they did their part, no matter how small, to fight the corruption drowning our world.

Sometimes, fighting corruption is more important than being right. And certainly more important than winning a game.