U.S. World Cup star's suspension lifted after Trump's call to FIFA president

By — Amna Nawaz Amna Nawaz By — Liz Landers Liz Landers By — Solveig Rennan Solveig Rennan By — Jonah Anderson Jonah Anderson Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-world-cup-stars-suspension-lifted-after-trumps-call-to-fifa-president Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio The United States takes on Belgium Monday with star striker Folarin Balogun on the pitch. Balogun was given a red card in last week’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, meaning he would miss the next game. But President Trump intervened and FIFA reversed Balogun's suspension. Amna Nawaz discussed the World Cup controversy with Liz Landers and Leander Schaerlaeckens, author of “The Long Game." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Amna Nawaz: All right, let's turn our attention now to President Trump's involvement in another international affair. That's the World Cup. The U.S. takes on Belgium tonight with star striker Flo Balogun on the pitch. Balogun was given a red card in last week's game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, meaning he would miss tonight's game. Then Trump intervened, and FIFA reversed Balogun's suspension, leading to controversy and outrage. For more, we turn now to our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, as well as Leander Schaerlaeckens, who's been covering the cup for ESPN and The Guardian, is the author of the book "The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top or Thereabouts." Leander, I will turn to you first, because you have covered soccer for a while. For context here,how unusual is it for a red card suspension to be handed out during a World Cup match and then reversed mid-tournament? How often does that happen? Leander Schaerlaeckens, The Guardian: The rules are very clear here. You get a red card, you're suspended for the next game. In fact, the last time I was on your very show, I was asked, is there any chance he will play in the next game? And I said no, because there wasn't. This has happened before in the World Cup. In 1962, a Brazilian player called Garrincha was kind of spared his automatic suspension. It hasn't happened since then. There's a little bit of a recent precedence, where Cristiano Ronaldo was supposed to miss the first two games of this World Cup because of a suspension. But then he went to the White House along with his Saudi employer, Mohammed bin Salman, and suddenly that suspension went away and he was ready to go in the opening games of this World Cup. But this is not supposed to happen. There is a huge uproar around the world about this, and rightly so, because what's happened here is that a wrong has been righted in the soccer sense, because it shouldn't have been a red card. And the U.S. played down a man for half-an-hour and was going to miss its best striker for this Belgium game. But in fixin