Two months after the World Cup and Belgium still hasn't received a single satisfactory explanation from FIFA over the Folarin Balogun red-card case. So now the RBFA is making it official: no answers, no vote for Gianni Infantino.
The Belgian federation announced Monday it will withhold support for Infantino's bid for another term as FIFA president unless FIFA can justify how it suspended Balogun's automatic ban — the one that conveniently allowed the U.S. striker to play against Belgium in the last 16, after Donald Trump personally lobbied Infantino to review the case. That sequence of events alone should have triggered an immediate, detailed institutional response. It didn't.
What Belgium actually wants
The RBFA isn't asking for an apology. It's asking for something FIFA apparently finds harder to deliver: transparency. The federation wants to know exactly how the disciplinary process works, why this case was treated differently, and what safeguards exist to prevent a repeat. They've formally requested the Balogun case be placed on the agenda for the FIFA Council meeting on October 15.
RBFA President Pascale Van Damme put it plainly: "Two months after the events, we note that our questions remain unanswered to date."
That's damning. Not because it's dramatic, but because it's so mundane — a member federation asking straightforward governance questions and being met with silence.
The Balogun case isn't even Belgium's only grievance. The RBFA also flagged concerns over FIFA Forward Enterprise, where several decisions reportedly lacked proper justification. Add in FIFA's proposed sale of a stake in World Cup commercial rights — which Belgium opposed — and you've got a federation that's been building a list of unanswered complaints for a while now.
The broader picture
Belgium is coordinating with UEFA on both issues, which matters. This isn't a small federation throwing a tantrum. UEFA-aligned opposition to Infantino carries institutional weight, and if Belgium's concerns resonate with other European associations ahead of the October council meeting, the pressure on FIFA's leadership becomes harder to brush off.
Whether FIFA responds before October 15 will say a lot about how seriously Infantino's camp takes the dissent. So far, their answer has been silence.
