FIFA rethinks rules after Balogun ban row

According to The Athletic, FIFA is drawing up changes to its disciplinary rulebook after a ban on Folarin Balogun was suspended during the 2026 World Cup, following a direct call from the United States president to the FIFA president. The report does not detail what Balogun was originally banned for, nor the exact nature of Trump's intervention, but it frames the episode as enough of a governance headache that Infantino's own organisation now wants new safeguards against it happening again.

That alone is the story here: a tournament-defining disciplinary decision reportedly bent, or at least paused, by a call from outside the game entirely. Whatever the original sanction was for, the optics are the problem. A suspension that can be lifted by a head of state's phone call is not a suspension anyone can fully trust, and that is presumably the gap FIFA is now trying to close.

Balogun, 25, was at the centre of it as a United States international with 29 caps and 11 goals for his country. At club level he's at AS Monaco, where he's racked up 18 goals and 5 assists in 40 appearances in the 2025/26 season we have on record, numbers that explain why losing him for even part of a home World Cup would have mattered to the US setup.

Why this gets awkward for FIFA

FIFA's disciplinary process exists to be applied evenly, win or lose, regardless of who's calling. If a suspension can be reopened by presidential pressure, every other ban handed out during the tournament becomes a comparison point. Did other federations get the same access? Did other players get the same call answered? The Athletic's report doesn't say, and that silence is exactly the kind of thing rule-makers tend to hate.

FIFA hasn't detailed what the new rules will actually look like, according to the report, so there's no amendment text to pick apart yet. But the direction is obvious enough: some kind of formal barrier between disciplinary rulings and outside political contact, built specifically because the current system apparently had none.

What happens from here

For Balogun, the ban itself was lifted and the World Cup moved on. For FIFA, the harder work is working out how to write a rule that stops a head of state's phone call from ever deciding a disciplinary case again, and doing it without admitting, on paper, that it just did.