Norway’s Soccer Chief To File Complaint Over Trump’s Intervention In World Cup Red Card Reversal

Norwegian Football Federation president Lise Klaveness says she plans to seek her board’s approval for an ethics complaint against FIFA, reviving objections to the governing body’s decision to lift a suspension handed to USMNT forward Folarin Balogun during this summer’s World Cup.

Balogun was sent off during the Americans’ round-of-32 win over Bosnia-Herzegovina after stepping on an opponent’s ankle, drawing an automatic one-match ban that would have kept him out of the round-of-16 matchup against Belgium. FIFA reversed course before that game, however, clearing Balogun to play by invoking Article 27 of its disciplinary code, which allows the organization to “fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure.”

The reversal came only after President Donald Trump personally phoned FIFA president Gianni Infantino to press the issue. Balogun ultimately featured in a 4-1 loss to Belgium that ended the U.S. run.

Klaveness told The Times of London that the episode “should not have happened” and pressed Infantino to publicly own up to the mistake. “When you bend a rule like this, you’re on a slippery slope that will put the whole game at risk,” she said, adding that the decision was “influenced from external forces and did not have the proper process.”

She went further, framing the reversal as a dangerous precedent for how far political leaders should be allowed to reach into the sport: “If you start to adapt in such a way towards state leaders and state politics, you will move your behavior and the organization’s behavior, and also the red line of what states’ leaders should interfere with. And that happened.”

Rather than filing a standalone challenge, Klaveness intends to fold the Balogun matter into an existing complaint the Norwegian federation has already lodged with FIFA’s ethics committee — one originally centered on Infantino’s decision to hand Trump the organization’s inaugural Peace Prize. She plans to bring the expanded complaint to her federation’s board for sign-off at a meeting scheduled for August 6.