"FIFA the major lawmaker are at fault." That was former referee Keith Hackett this week, and it's hard to argue with him after the governing body handed Jarell Quansah a two-match suspension while letting Folarin Balogun walk free from what looked like a near-identical challenge.
Both players were sent off for studs-up sliding challenges — Quansah during England's last-16 win over Mexico, Balogun in the United States' round-of-32 victory over Bosnia. Both saw red. Both were judged serious foul play. Then FIFA's disciplinary process produced two entirely different outcomes.
Quansah got two matches. Balogun got one — then had even that suspended on probation for a year under Article 27 of FIFA's disciplinary code. FIFA has not publicly explained why Article 27 applied to Balogun's case and not Quansah's. England's FA said the suspension could not be appealed. So Quansah sits, while Balogun plays on.
"That's not what you expect" — Eriksson
Jonas Eriksson, a FIFA referee for 16 years, put it bluntly: if Balogun's offence warranted one match, Quansah should have received the same. The two incidents were, in his assessment, roughly equal in intensity and aggression.
"What everyone wants from referees — they want correct decisions, yes, but more important always is consistency," Eriksson told Reuters. "That you identify, okay, player A gets the same sanction as player B. That's what you expect. And this is not the case."
He called the lack of explanation the core problem. Without a public rationale — was the referee wrong on the pitch? Was it a misapplication of the laws? — nobody can evaluate the decision properly. "It's just for you and me and for everybody else to guess," Eriksson said.
The Trump factor isn't going away
The controversy deepened further when it emerged U.S. President Donald Trump had personally contacted FIFA President Gianni Infantino to push for a review of Balogun's case. FIFA insists that conversation had no bearing on the outcome. That may well be true. But when the suspension is lifted without explanation, and the host nation's head of state has been on the phone to FIFA's boss, the optics don't exactly help FIFA's case.
Belgium tried to challenge Balogun's eligibility before their round-of-16 match against the United States and lost that appeal too — again, without any public explanation from FIFA about how it reached its conclusion.
Hackett accused FIFA of allowing "outside interference by the president." Eriksson stopped short of that allegation but called the Quansah ruling "a mystery" given the suspended ban handed to Balogun. Either the two cases are comparable — in which case the sanctions should match — or they aren't, and FIFA needs to explain why. Right now, it's done neither.
For anyone trying to assess how disciplinary suspensions might affect World Cup knockout-stage squads, the lesson from this episode is that FIFA's process is opaque enough to make any projection essentially worthless.
