All the presidents’ meddling: the Balogun scandal shows how Fifa can break football | Barney Ronay

So far much of the domestic US response has focused on an interesting but essentially irrelevant part of this, albeit one with a natural appeal to the polarised heart of the nation. Did the noise around Trump’s intervention, the admission, which is denied by Fifa, of prima facie attempted sporting corruption over Folarin Balogun’s ban (Trump’s exact words: “I was the one who got them to do it”) deplete the team’s chances?

Was this a case of Trump Exposed Reactor Core Phenomenon, a term I have just invented for the dynamic whereby Trump melts everything he touches while remaining indestructibly in place, still burping his dark energy into the skies?

It is easy to clear this one up. The defeat was simple. Ignore the host nation hype and the USA team is inferior to Belgium in almost every position. If Leandro Trossard was American he’d be on a million billboards eating crisps and talking about his global legacy. Even the aged Romelu Lukaku, largely immobile now, appearing at the edge of your vision as though someone has trundled a soviet-era statue on to the pitch on a set of roller skates, is still smart enough to out-aura the USA defence.

Trump has no bearing on these sporting facts. But his intervention is still profound. It is, as ever, necessary to block out the zone-flooding noise and focus on the actual story. Which is not Trump, out there simply being Trump. The real issue is Gianni Infantino and Fifa, the live note in a genuinely jaw-dropping sporting scandal.

Dictators always look unassailable while they’re dictating. But who knows, this might even be the first significant note of Infantino’s own endgame, the moment football’s great preening waxwork power-gargoyle flew just a bit too close to the sun and began to melt inside his own blue suit.

The Trump aspect is important, but can also be dealt with quite quickly. In the end he just couldn’t keep those ferreting hands off this thing. Last week I wrote an article about Trump’s unexpected invisibility across the opening three weeks of this World Cup, during which he attended no games and made no significant pronouncements.

It had to be a strategy. In the buildup Trump had been all over the World Cup like an overly friendly estate agent standing too close in the lift, breathing down its neck, fondling the trophies, toying with the attentions of the Fifa president, who spent 18 months chasing him around like a lovesick nine-year-old, offering a friendship bracelet, a peace prize, a magical ball.

Here Trump sat on those hands for three weeks, fighting the urge, taking a leaf out of the Putin 2018 playbook of just letting the show happen, the colour and sugar flood the zone while … Oh hang on, where’s he gone?

Fast forward five days and the thing has now happened. Trump has treated the World Cup like the women in his infamous Access Hollywood “locker-room banter”.

And there will be damage here, a price to be paid.

Most obviously by the poor old game itself; by the USA team, whose achievement in reaching the last 16 has been totally muddied; and perhaps even by Infantino, who has played the role of chief enabler, and whose governance of Fifa has become a grotesque real-time case study in the dangers of unchecked executive power.

There is at least a kind of openness to Trump’s actions. The laughably doomed attempt to back-channel this fell apart when he effectively outed himself on his own social media, the Truth Social feed that seems risible at first but which has something oddly stark and sad in its relentlessness, like tuning in to the lucid ravings of the latest 4am lost soul on the Penn station steps, a live mic to the tender madness of the American soul.

Even Trump’s belated first World Cup appearance on Monday afternoon was utterly moreish, the wobbly camera angles, the rambling tone, like a local mayor on the town hall steps denying the existence of a taxpayer-funded office massage chair (although oddly Trump was pretty good on the softness of the Balogun red card, while admitting he didn’t actually know what a red card was. A side note: Trump is already better at this than Peter Walton).

It is important to note this is all just unplanned chaos, an example of Trump’s capacity for irrelevance after coming to power in a blaze of fear over his potentially world-altering energy. Trump can throw haymakers in the Gulf: all he has done is strengthen Iran and the Arab alliance. His tariff war has been eaten up. The outside world sees this basic lack of plan, the trivial obsessions. This is now the guy Belgium’s footballers get to dance-mock on his own front lawn.

So let us turn away from the show at the front of the stage. For Infantino, for Fifa and for football this is deadly serious. And Infantino must be held to account here, at the very least for the breathtaking levels of vanity and power-lust that have normalised such interventions.

The details are important. The New York Times has reported that Trump called Infantino directly after the Bosnia and Herzegovina game, during which Balogun was sent off. One day later the Fifa rules on red cards were unilaterally circumvented, the first time this has happened at a World Cup since the infamous Garrincha shemozzle of 1962.

It has been reported the Trump administration threatened to lawfare this, that Andrew Giuliani, director of the White House World Cup taskforce, had his office comb the rules looking for points to attack. This is the Trump starter pack. Don’t like the facts? Trash their legitimacy.

Rule two is go low, go ad hominem. Other voices attacked the referee’s legitimacy, on spurious grounds. What is the end game here? Fur-clad Trump ultras storming Fifa house in Zurich and voiding their bowels on the conference table?

Infantino has now gone into emergency clarification mode. The Fifa disciplinary panels are, he has assured the world, entirely independent. He himself has zero sway. All that matters here, the hill Infantino will die on, is due process and the sanctity of the law.

And yet the facts remain uncomfortably present. Balogun received a red card, which still stands. President spoke unto president. And for the first time a straight tournament red card did not mean missing the next game.

It is hard to explain to those outside football’s existing culture how damaging this is to the spectacle, and to the soul of the game itself. It looks like gerrymandering the outcome, at which point the whole endlessly marketable fascination just collapses.

On the inside: lives, careers, hopes, and vast amounts of money hinge on these outcomes. But as a product, you’re now watching scripted entertainment. The thing you see, the game of the people, source of joy, collectivism and social mobility, cannot be trusted. This is how Fifa can break football, and do so in plain sight.

Perhaps the most startling element is still the level of arrogance and unaccountability required to get to this point. There is an interesting aspect to the Trump-Infantino relationship. Who gets to survive? Who takes most? Who gets burnt?

It won’t be Trump, for whom football is an insect-level sideshow. But in any sane organisation Infantino would be under huge pressure for taking football into these spaces. What was he expecting to happen when he handed our own shared antique Crystal heirloom, to an excitable adolescent? Should we be surprised when Trump gets bored, mid-party, and decides to chuck it down the stairs just to see what happens?

The wider question is whether this has any effect on Infantino’s hold on power ahead of the election for another term next year. The obvious answer is: of course not. Fifa votes are essentially negotiations. There are 211 voting members, who will follow whoever offers the biggest number. And Infantino has sold and sold to shore up his war chest.

But there are limits to everything. The Norwegian federation has already thrown its weight behind an ethics complaint over the inane and inexplicable Trump peace prize. Some inside Fifa are troubled by Infantino’s posturings as a one-man global brand. Not just the fawning over power, or the use of his own Instagram page as Fifa’s main public voice (this is an administrator who thought it was fine to pose for a selfie with Pelé’s coffin), or the trebling of his own total annual payments in the past decade from £1.3m to £4.65m last year.

This is before we get on to the micromanaging of the vote process for Saudi 2034, or the disruptive power grab of the Club World Cup. Sepp Blatter, who has his own agenda, has suggested Infantino is an isolated figure, unwilling to share a lift with lesser staff. Who knows, there might even be a challenge next year from the likes of Victor Montagliani, the Canadian head of Concacaf, who gave a speech recently noting that “leadership is not about power”.

The Fifa of Infantino is at least now revealed in its final form, defined by the conflict between regulatory duties and its status as essentially an entertainment platform, a conflict Infantino skates over with hallucinogenic chatter about the magic of football, the holiness of the ball, casting himself as a benign and pious Yoda-ball custodian.

Perhaps the worst part of all this is the sense of chances missed. Imagine what could have been done with all this power and influence in other hands. But there is also defiance. On a minor note, the events of the last week have been a massive tick for the referees, who have in reality shown a total lack of partiality, applying a standard of rules-nerd rigour even to their slightly harsh red cards.

Beyond this there is also something glorious in the spectacle of a World Cup that has been invited in by Trump, but which has escaped his attempts to control it, with its shared joy, its diaspora collectivism, its jigsaw identification of what a nation actually is.

Whatever its ultimate effects, the extent of the current outrage tells us this. Just as the World Cup is also telling the US things, that the world still needs it, and that it can be something other than this. As too can Fifa. A tiny little smoking fuse has been lit here, one that will probably sputter out, as these things do. But there is still hope in giving it air.