About 25 years ago, I was in the office of a sports newspaper in Bucharest on a Saturday afternoon following the Premier League games with some local journalists. With about five minutes to go, Chelsea trailed 2-1. Somebody had backed Chelsea to lose and brandished his betting slip. Chelsea scored. A couple of minutes later, they scored again. The reporter tossed the slip away. I saw drama; the Romanians saw a fix.
This is why integrity and the perception of integrity are so important. I don’t think that game was fixed. There is no evidence whatsoever it was fixed. Given the salaries players earn and the sophistication of the early warning system for unusual betting patterns, there is little chance Premier League games are fixed. But if you grew up in the declining days of the Ceauşescu era or the wild west that followed, when match-fixing wasn’t so much an open secret as a simple fact, cynicism is the natural response.
That is fatal. What makes sport great is that it is unknowable. Strange things happen. A team suddenly score twice in a couple of minutes. A player does something brilliant. A player does something terrible. A referee makes an inexplicable decision. Because it is low-scoring, it is perhaps less predictable than other sports. It is viable for a weaker side to defend for 90 minutes and hope to win with a counter or a set play. A team can have 30 shots and their opponents one and still lose. Miracles happen. Remarkable acts of resilience happen. Incredible denouements happen. It means something because it is real.
Script it and there is an emptiness. There’s a new James Graham play in which Dan Burn heads the ball loads and England win 3-2 in the Azteca despite having a man sent off? Boring. There’s a new Jonathan Franzen novel in which a USA team that are slowly gaining respect find themselves despised because of the machinations of their president and lose limply to Belgium? Boring. There’s a new Juan José Campanella film in which Argentina go 2-0 down to Egypt and there’s some controversial refereeing then Lionel Messi does something amazing and they win? Boring. But if those things happen in real life? Then that’s the finest drama known to man.
That’s why, in suspending Folarin Balogun’s suspension, Gianni Infantino was playing a dangerous game. Undermine the credibility of sport and you kill it.
This has been a slightly odd tournament. Seeding the four favourites ensured a more balanced draw than has sometimes been the case, but, still, the lack of actual shocks has been unusual. Big teams have been held to draws, but, aside from Paraguay beating Germany on penalties, the only surprise has been Norway beating Brazil and frankly that was a surprise only in terms of the world rankings, not for anybody who’d seen either side play over the past year.
On the one hand, that led to a fascinating set of quarter-finalists: big teams, big names and Switzerland. Perhaps if you were hand-picking it, you’d have Colombia and Senegal in there for geographical spread and their support (although Senegal fans in their red, yellow and green suits is a dream beyond US immigration regulations), but the dream list would look pretty similar to what we got.
The Golden Boot race is a marketeers’ dream. The favourites keep being pushed to the brink then making it through, a best of both worlds situation (fun as it would have been, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cape Verde or Egypt are not going to pull in TV audiences anywhere near as big as England or Argentina).
But that’s where the doubts begin to mass. What if the big teams are being favoured for financial reasons? Should Messi have been sent off for planting his studs into Aissa Mandi’s calf in the game against Algeria? (And if he had been, would the resulting ban have been suspended using article 27, as Balogun’s was?) Was the penalty that Argentina won against Austria really a clear and obvious error that required the intervention of the video assistant referee? Did Alexis Mac Allister commit a foul in the buildup to Messi’s goal in that game? Why was an Egypt goal ruled out for a foul when Argentina’s winner was not?
The refereeing in this tournament has been patchy; most of it good, but on some occasions, notably in France’s win over Paraguay, efforts to let the game flow have legitimised obvious foul play. Similarly, attempts to reduce simulation have led to some clear infringements being ignored. VAR, meanwhile, has been erratic, at times laissez-faire in the extreme and at others pettifogging in its legalism.
Perhaps that’s all it is. Humans are imperfect. Refereeing is difficult. Trying to achieve a uniform standard for 52 referees drawn from across the globe is far from straightforward. Fan conspiracy theories about officiating are one of the most tedious aspects of the modern game, usually rooted in a couple of 50-50 decisions that have gone against their team and fuelled by VAR. It has created a climate when perfection is demanded and there is no room for human error or even ambiguity. Usually, they can easily be dismissed.
But then you get the president of the United States boasting about prevailing on Infantino to suspend Balogun’s suspension. Had there been an appeals process that had determined his red card had been incorrectly awarded, there would have been few complaints. But there was no process. Justice looked arbitrary. Fifa tweaked things to make them easier for the USA. What, then, to make of Infantino’s weird reaction to Cape Verde’s second equaliser against Argentina? What to make of the sense that many of the marginal decisions have gone Argentina’s way?
Previously, the rant from the Egypt manager, Hossam Hassan, about the need to keep Messi in the tournament could have been dismissed as the bitter rambling of a disappointed man, but then you remember Fifa gerrymandered the qualifying process for the Club World Cup to ensure the presence of Inter Miami and Messi and that Fifa suspended two games of Cristiano Ronaldo’s three-game ban for his red card against Ireland in qualifying so he could play in every group-stage game (and then had to declare an amnesty for three other suspended players).
Fifa likes famous players to be involved. What if entertainment concerns, the grubby lust for growth, have come to supplant sporting concerns?
This is the fire with which Infantino is playing. Sport only means something when it is believable: football without faith is nothing. Marketing can never take priority over sporting concerns. When the perception of integrity has gone, the doubt lingers – as it did for Romanians around the turn of the millennium. And if the doubts linger too long, the sport is dead.
