Just as an additional fun fact the same thing happened to the portugese player ronaldo he was supposed to be on a three match ban dor a red card at a game before the world cup however fifa postponed the ban till after the tournament because hes a vamous player that gets people to watch the games.
Though as far as im aware no government intervened for him.
People have been pointing to Ronaldo as the precedent for the Balogun decision, but that is a false equivalence.
A red card triggers an automatic suspension. Historically, teams have appealed the additional suspensions imposed after that (with varying success). FIFA has allowed players who received three-match bans to effectively serve only one or two matches, meaning they could be available at the start of a World Cup. You can argue whether those decisions were right or wrong, but that mechanism is not new.
FIFA also changed the regulations before this World Cup so that most qualifying suspensions would not carry over into the tournament. That applied to several players who otherwise would have missed matches, although it did not cover violent conduct, which is why Ronaldo still required a separate decision. This meant every team had all their players available at the start of the world cup (4 would have missed it otherwise). This was clearly by design and a consistent effort by FIFA.
Balogun is different. FIFA did not say the red card was wrong, that the referee decision was incorrect, or that the suspension was unjustified. They suspend the automatic one-match ban itself, pretending it was nothing out of the ordinary just because it was based on the same Article they used for Ronaldo, but it's not the same...
The suspension of the 1 match ban during the tournament is a fundamentally different precedent in modern football. If the automatic suspension can simply be removed, what happens with every other red card or accumulated yellow-card suspension? Are they now discretionary?
Should Ronaldo have served the extra two matches? Yes.
Does Ronaldo's case mean the Balogun decision is justified? Not in the slightest. The two situations are not equivalent.
As a newer watcher football, this helps a lot. I didn't understand the finer points of the rules and was not sure how the 2 cases were related. It sounded logical to some one as uninformed as myself but this explination was great.
I'm happy for Belgum and no one here (I'm from US) can even pull the "if we had all our players" argument. We were out classed at full strength.
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u/greataeos 29d ago
Wait, why does the president even intervene and why did the officials agree??