Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | July 6, 2026
I’ve caught World Cup fever in a bad way this year. It started with that dominant USA win over Paraguay in the group stage and was reinforced by the pure, uncut glee of Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard on Ted Lasso) on his World Cup podcast. I obviously don’t have the knowledge or the vernacular of Lord Castleton to break down the games themselves, but I do know enough to know that the USA Men’s team is typically good-but-not-great. Aside from a lone quarterfinal run in 2002, we haven’t advanced past the Round of 16 — where we sit heading into tonight’s game against Belgium — since the inaugural World Cup in 1930, a tournament most European teams declined to attend because they couldn’t afford to travel to South America during the Great Depression.
All of which is to say: USA’s run this year has been a blast to watch, and even some of my very progressive friends — the ones more political than sports-oriented — had softened enough to stop actively rooting against the USA out of antipathy toward the current state of our democracy. Part of the reason might have been Folarin Balogun, USA’s top scorer, who is English, has Nigerian parents, and qualified to play for the United States only because he happened to have been born here — doctors wouldn’t let his vacationing mom fly home when she was seven months pregnant. Ironically, Balogun might be considered what the far-right calls a beneficiary of “birth tourism,” inadvertent though it may have been, and had the Supreme Court decided differently last week, Balogun might have lost his U.S. citizenship.
The point is: We had a nice, feel-good story going — something much of America could actually feel good about in this country’s 250th year of existence.
And now that’s out the door.
In USA’s first knockout match last week, Balogun scored a goal in our 2-0 victory before being sent off with a red card — a red card that also meant Balogun, our best scorer, would not be able to play in tonight’s Round of 16 game against Belgium. Was the red card warranted? That was a topic of heated debate after the match. Did Balogun intentionally or maliciously hurt another player? He obviously did not. Did his inadvertent actions endanger the safety of another player? Arguably, yes. But that wasn’t apparent from the referee’s vantage point during live play. It only became evident during slow-motion video replay (VAR). You can watch the evidence for yourself. Initially, there doesn’t seem to be much here — maybe a yellow card, at worst — but after the replay, out comes the red.
From what we were all led to believe, the ruling was final. There was no appeal. USA was lucky to escape the match despite playing a man down, and we’d just have to tough it out against Belgium without Balogun. We would complain. We would gnash our teeth; we would shake our fists; and if we lost, we would place the blame squarely at the feet of FIFA, the governing body of the World Cup.
That’s how it’s supposed to work: The ref makes a questionable call, we scream and yell about the unfairness of it all, and then we move on and play the game. If we lose, we blame FIFA! If we win, hooray — we won despite that questionable call. That’s basically how it has worked for every other country in the history of the World Cup.
But then, yesterday, FIFA reversed itself. It suspended the red card, and now Folarin Balogun will play. I’ll admit that for about three minutes, I was thrilled. But as the dust settled and more information came to light — namely, that the President had personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino (a man with a long history of bending over backward to flatter Trump), and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had been working the angles behind the scenes — well, it all soured very quickly.
Once again, the United States had become the exception. We just couldn’t tough it out like every other country. Our entitled asses simply had to get our way. And now this feel-good story about the USA team isn’t so feel-good anymore. We threw our weight around, pitched a tantrum, made demands, and got exactly what we wanted. If we win tonight, it’ll be tainted by FIFA’s decision to reverse a red card — something it has essentially never done before (once, in 1962, back when red cards didn’t even carry automatic suspensions).
Everything that man touches really does turn to crap.
I’ll still be rooting for USA tonight, but it won’t be full-throated. Besides, my heart has already moved on to Norway, and the real-life Viking leading them, Erling Haaland. What an absolute blast it is to watch him play, and I can’t wait to watch him wipe that princely smirk off of Harry Kane’s mug (no offense to England’s team or that rock star Jude Bellingham).
