The his­tor­i­cal claim that the FIFA World Cup  presents “…an oppor­tu­ni­ty to fos­ter peace and good­will among com­pet­ing nations” is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, more lofty ide­al than real­i­ty. But it does have a use­ful appli­ca­tion in the foul-beset field of diplo­mat­ic games­man­ship — Red and Yel­low cards.

No mat­ter what lan­guage they speak, every sin­gle one of the bil­lions of peo­ple who will spend the next three weeks cheer­ing on their nation­al pride under­stand when, and at what lev­el a penal­ty has been allotted.
A Yel­low card held aloft by a ref­er­ee sig­nals infrac­tions that include abuse, timer-wast­ing and unsport­ing behaviour.
Two yel­lows earns a Red and ejec­tion from the game. An imme­di­ate Red can be issued for  more seri­ous offens­es, includ­ing dan­ger­ous tack­les, phys­i­cal aggres­sion or alter­ca­tions, offen­sive lan­guage and insults.
The beau­ty of apply­ing the sys­tem to inter­na­tion­al con­flict res­o­lu­tion, is that observers who have nei­ther the abil­i­ty nor time to delve deeply into the nit­ty-grit­ty of what­ev­er per­fidy is in need of res­o­lu­tion — would have a scale to mea­sure who’s in the wrong, with­out being over­whelmed by the nuanced details or overblown rhetoric and theatrics.
The para­me­ters and rules of con­duct were long put in place and spelled out in detail by inter­na­tion­al agree­ments, treaties, the Gene­va and oth­er con­ven­tions and UN resolutions.
Estab­lish­ing a pro­ce­dure for des­ig­nat­ing neu­tral and qual­i­fied ref­er­ees would be com­plex and tax­ing, but con­trary to cur­rent evi­dence, there are more than enough expe­ri­enced diplo­mats and nego­tia­tors avail­able that it could be done.
There’s even a Video Assis­tant Ref­er­ee (VAR) already in place in the form of jour­nal­ists, inde­pen­dent observers and recog­nised inter­na­tion­al aid agencies
And best of all, the foot­ball rules apply to man­agers and sup­port coach­ing staff, as well as players.
FIFA, the world gov­ern­ing body of what every­one but Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans call foot­ball, not soc­cer  (an affec­ta­tion, it is worth not­ing, that the rest of the sport’s bil­lions of fans accept with a wry grin, rather than offen­sive­ly word­ed objec­tions), set its own prece­dent for hold­ing up a Red  card to diplo­mat­ic fouls.
In 1966, the UK want­ed to ban North Korea from the World Cup com­pe­ti­tion for polit­i­cal rea­sons. Accord­ing to an inter­nal British For­eign office memo at the time, FIFA “… made it very plain to the FA (Foot­ball Asso­ci­a­tion) that if any team that has won its way through to the finals is denied visas, then the finals will take place elsewhere.”

                 AN OWN GOAL FOUL

Cur­rent FIFA Pres­i­dent Gian­ni Infan­ti­no promised that Mex­i­co, Cana­da and the U.S. the three nations co-host­ing the 2026  foot­ball extrav­a­gan­za, would  “…wel­come the world and deliv­er the biggest, best and most inclu­sive FIFA World Cup ever.”
How­ev­er, Infan­ti­no, who last year pre­sent­ed Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump with the spu­ri­ous hon­our of the far­ci­cal “FIFA Peace Prize” he invent­ed for the occa­sion, didn’t see fit to call for a Red, or even a Yel­low card when Soma­li ref­er­ee Omar Abdulka­dir Artan, named Africa’s best ref­er­ee last year, and described as hav­ing an “icon­ic” sta­tus  and a “sym­bol of resilience”, was detained and  denied entry to the U.S.  at Mia­mi Inter­na­tion­al Air­port, and forced to fly back home.
So much for FIFA’s mot­to: “Foot­ball Unites the World”
A U.S. State Depart­ment spokesper­son said in a writ­ten state­ment that said the Trump admin­is­tra­tion “…will not waver in uphold­ing U.S. law and the high­est stan­dards of nation­al secu­ri­ty and pub­lic safe­ty in the con­duct of our visa process.”.
It was not made clear exact­ly what, or how great a threat a world-renowned ref­er­ee, who had a valid visa, could pos­si­bly pose  to the secu­ri­ty of the self-described world’s most pow­er­ful nation and military.
Are there rules that must be fol­lowed so that no one has to think?
Or is it a case of “why both­er with com­mon sense?”
Grant­ed, that’s a com­mod­i­ty not much in evi­dence in the U.S. gov­ern­ment body politic these days. Or many oth­ers in the world, come to that.
The con­duct of all the play­ers — Israel, Iran, Hezbol­lah, Hamas, the Houthis the U.S. and even Lebanon — involved in the morass of vio­lence and grand­stand­ing “nego­ti­a­tion” that befouls the Mid­dle East, have earned so many Yel­low and Red Cards over the past three years that had there been a ref­er­ee to raise his arm, all of the star and start­ing play­ers would be back in the dress­ing room by now.
And with luck, as it often is in foot­ball, the bench warm­ers who final­ly get a chance for glo­ry, are the ones who rise to the occa­sion and score the winner.
Wouldn’t that be a World Cup for the ages?

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