Thanks a lot for ruining the combination for my luggage!

Red cards have always led to a suspension of at least the next game, as was again confirmed by FIFA before this cup. Further suspensions can be and often are reduced indeed (e.g. Ronaldo’s suspension during qualifications was reduced from 3 to 1 matches).

Whether it’s truly a red card or not is not really the issue here. What about all other dodgy red cards? What about dodgy goals? Are we going to call those all into doubt too? During the game the referee and by extension the VAR decides. Teams can argue on the field and once the game is over: that’s it, no more discussion about the decisions. Discussion about future cups can happen of course, but you can’t just change the rules of a running cup. That’s not fair to anyone who properly followed them.

I honestly don’t give a damn about Belgium winning or not, but I really don’t like how the US and FIFA are corrupting something that a large part of the world holds very dear. That’s an outright shame. What happened here is unprecedented.

I’m not a fan of football in general but the moment they start dismissing the rules under government pressure is the moment they lose all what’s left of their little credibility.

FIFA is corrupt to the bone, but until now it stayed away from corrupting the game itself, at least officially. There are plenty of dodgy cases with referees and inconsistent applications of the rules, but so far this never extrapolated to interference by the organisers themselves.