TOI correspondent from Washington : Belgium emphatically settled World Cup football's most combustible game on the field on Monday, handing the United States its backside with a 4-1 thrashing in Seattle despite President Trump’s intervention that led to FIFA's extraordinary decision to suspend Folarin Balogun's automatic red-card ban.
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Belgium's response to the White House strong-arming FIFA was delightfully uncomplicated: Score early, score often, and advance to the quarterfinals. Then dance.
After Romelu Lukaku sealed Belgium's fourth goal, following a brace by Charles De Ketelaere and Hans Vanaken goal from a keeper error, several Belgian players mocked Trump by imitating his trademark campaign-rally dance to the strains of "YMCA." The Belgian FA's official account posted the clip with the caption "Y-M-C-A, we're going to the next round, hey hey!"
Around Europe, the result was greeted with varying degrees of schadenfreude, that elegant German word for delighting in someone’s misery. Newspapers and broadcasters noted the irony that after days of debate over whether politics had tilted the playing field, Belgium had won so convincingly that no conspiracy theory could survive contact with the final scoreline.
US reactions ranged from defiant (“We wuz robbed... by our own president?” ) to existential despair (“Time to stick to basketball”). Pundits debated whether Trump’s meddling fired up Belgium or just exposed the fragility of the American project. One Fox commentator grumbled it was “rigged by woke refs,” while MSNBC called it “diplomacy by red card.”
Disappointment over the elimination was mixed with frustration that what should have been remembered as the country's deepest World Cup run in years instead became entangled in an international debate over presidential influence, football governance and whether Article 27 of FIFA's disciplinary code had suddenly become the world's most famous legal provision. US coach Mauricio Pochettino and his players insisted afterward that the political storm surrounding Balogun had not affected their performance.
Social media, naturally, showed less restraint, with memes proliferating faster than Belgium's counterattacks. “JUST IN: Trump says Belgium is 2 weeks away from developing a nuclear bomb,” one wag noted, in an implicit warning about the dodgy US modus operandi before bombing a country.
For many, the episode cemented America’s reputation as the World Cup’s wacky rich uncle – plenty of resources, endless drama, and a habit of making everything about one guy. Belgium, meanwhile, advanced with the satisfaction of a perfectly timed burn. As one Belgian fan tweeted: “We didn’t need a phone call. We just needed 90 minutes.”
But for everyone else who wondered whether politics could rewrite football's laws, the World Cup supplied its own reminder: presidents may lobby, lawyers may argue and FIFA may deliberate, but the only thing that matters is the scoreline. Belgium did not waffle when it mattered.
