RELATED: FIFA rejects Belgium's appeal of Folarin Balogun's red card ban suspension
"He (Balogun) didn't do anything wrong, and he's our best player or one of our best players. And he gave him a red card. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't think it meant much," the president said. "So yes, I asked for a review by FIFA. I spoke to a man who is highly respected."
In a statement posted to social media, that man, Infantino, wrote, "I did receive a call from President Donald Trump, just as I receive calls from heads of state, government officials, football stakeholders, and business executives from around the world on many different issues. During our conversation, I explained that there was an ongoing legal process involving FIFA's independent judicial bodies and that the case would be decided in due course by the competent bodies. That is how FIFA's system works"
The system is objectively political. That's the assessment from Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a professor at Rice University's Baker Institute who studied the issue and spoke to ABC13 from Europe.
"Well, I think sport and politics have always been closely linked. But under the current FIFA leadership of Gianni Infantino, they have been even more closely tied together," Coates Ulrichsen said. "Infantino has spent several years developing a very close relationship with the US president, and We've seen that play out over the last few days, but even before this World Cup, I think we've seen World Cups in Russia and in Qatar and without... without... I mean, the FIFA leadership tries to claim that sport is not political, but every decision that they make has a political dimension to it. I think what is... what now is new is that it is much more open and on the surface."
Most recently, there are the politics of Name, Image, and Likeness revenue. Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz has a bill awaiting a vote on the floor that would regulate college sports, and there are, in fact, countless examples throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. There was the Cold War, and that legendary 1980 Olympic Hockey semifinals between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
"We've always had sport and politics really being kind of clashes between nations because it's much easier to individualize a nation when it's 11 or 15 or however many individuals wearing a uniform," Coates Ulrichsen said. "It becomes us against them. And that's part of that mass appeal, that mobilizing power that sport can have."
Months after that miracle on ice in the Lake Placid Winter Games, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the summer games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"If the Soviets do not withdraw their troops immediately from Afghanistan within a month," President Carter said at the time, "I would not support the sending of an American team to the Olympics."
The Soviets reciprocated 4 years later and boycotted the summer games in Los Angeles.
In the 1970s, there was Title 9 congressional legislation that came closer to leveling the playing field for women student athletes.
And in the 1960s, there was Muhammad Ali, heavyweight boxing champion of the world, who was stripped of his title after being drafted and refusing to be inducted into the army here in Houston for religious reasons.
The red card controversy may be only the most recent example of politics playing games in sports. But it will most assuredly not be the last.