Severe blowback over FIFA’s ‘shameful, incomprehensible’ Balogun decision<\/a><\/p>\nFIFA has always insisted it is politically neutral. But its integrity is now being questioned after US President Donald Trump confirmed he asked for Folarin Balogun’s suspension to be reviewed.<\/p>\n
“FairSquare will file a complaint to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regarding FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s repeated breach of political neutrality rules,” the London-based sports and human rights NGO said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The pledge to file a formal complaint to the IOC Ethics Commission came one day after the Olympic body’s president, Kirsty Coventry, told reporters none had been received.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, if they do, they would look into it,” Coventry said on Tuesday in an online news conference when asked about the Balogun controversy fuelled by the Trump administration lobbying FIFA and Infantino.<\/p>\n
“Yes, we have been obviously watching everything play out,” she said earlier when asked about interference in field-of-play issues by the World Cup co-host nation, which will also stage the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.<\/p>\n
FIFA was asked to comment about the complaint.<\/p>\n
More on FIFA World Cup 2026The Infantino-Trump ties<\/p>\n
Infantino has built close ties to Trump since 2018 when the US, Canada and Mexico won a vote to host the 2026 World Cup.<\/p>\n
The FIFA leader has been a regular White House visitor since attending the second Trump inauguration in January 2025 and said in November “we should all support” the president’s work as it was “pretty good”.<\/p>\n
Infantino famously created the FIFA Peace Prize given to Trump at the World Cup tournament draw in Washington DC in December. Senior soccer officials said privately that creating the peace award was an executive decision by Infantino.<\/p>\n
FairSquare also formally filed a complaint to FIFA’s ethics committee in December about Infantino and political neutrality. That is being supported by the Norway soccer federation and about 50 members of the European Parliament.<\/p>\n
FIFA has provided no update on that case in the seven months since.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FIFA president Gianni Infantino is being referred to Olympics ethics investigators for a possible breach of political neutrality…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,2490,13201,16135,91951,596,13202,13198,85,131203],"class_list":["post-788316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-donald-trump","tag-fifa","tag-fifa-world-cup","tag-folarin-balogun","tag-football","tag-gianni-infantino","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-usmnt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}