Cristiano Ronaldo’s suspended ban<\/a> before this tournament. <\/p>\nUnder Fifa’s disciplinary code, Ronaldo should have received a three-match ban for elbowing Dara O’Shea during Portugal’s 2-0 qualifying defeat by the Republic of Ireland in November.<\/p>\n
He served one match in the final qualifier against Armenia – but the remaining two games of the ban were suspended.<\/p>\n
Ronaldo’s red card, though, was received in qualifying. It was not a red card at a World Cup.<\/p>\n
There have been many cases of players being shown some leniency before a tournament, not just Ronaldo.<\/p>\n
See France’s Laurent Koscielny in 2014, or Ecuador’s Moises Caicedo and Argentina’s Nicolas Otamendi before this World Cup.<\/p>\n
At least with Ronaldo, we were given some justification, with Fifa saying it had taking into account that “he had no red cards in his other 225 international appearances”.<\/p>\n
With Balogun, we did not even get that.<\/p>\n
It has left a vacuum of information which can only lead to speculation.<\/p>\n
Why was this a special case? What factors were taken into account? Who made the decision?<\/p>\n
BBC Sport has been told there are no suggestions that the referee asked for the suspension to be removed, or that video assistant referee protocol was not respected.<\/p>\n
In England, the Football Association would publish the full written reasons. <\/p>\n
The United States have the right to ask Fifa to publish them, Belgium do not. <\/p>\n
BBC Sport pundit Micah Richards, a former England defender, said it was a farce.<\/p>\n
“To have it suspended for a year makes a mockery of the whole tournament,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It is to keep the big stars in the competition. How can that happen? Fifa needs to do better. <\/p>\n
“It has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”<\/p>\n
Belgium are, of course, furious. They issued a statement on Sunday saying they were “astonished” that Balogun had been cleared to play.<\/p>\n
The Belgian FA referenced several regulations, workshop presentations and pre-tournament co-ordination meetings. <\/p>\n
They are adamant that the decision contradicts the tournament regulations which state that a player “will automatically be suspended from their team’s subsequent match”.<\/p>\n
In effect, they say Fifa used its disciplinary code to override the competition regulations.<\/p>\n
Belgium head coach Rudi Garcia, speaking at a news conference, went further. He said: “I didn’t know that [at] the Fifa World Cup 5 July is now 1 April, and that is April Fool’s.<\/p>\n
“We are not defending the national team or the federation, we’re defending football.”<\/p>\n
What must the other players sent off at this tournament be thinking?<\/p>\n
Take Qatar’s Assim Madibo, involved in an unfortunate incident which led to a broken leg for Canada’s midfielder Ismael Kone.<\/p>\n
There is a clear case here that Madibo did not even make a challenge, that the injury happened by chance and not because of the nature of the tackle.<\/p>\n
Yet Fifa handed Madibo a five-game ban – and extra three on top of the standard punishment for serious foul play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is one overriding question many people are now asking. How? Fifa’s disciplinary code states that Balogun should…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-675933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}