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Nigel Owens believes the controversy around Folarin Balogun’s suspended red card has damaged confidence in officials at the FIFA World Cup
04:06, 11 Jul 2026
Obviously there’s a lot of sports on the tele at the moment. If you love sport then you must be in heaven because you’ve got Wimbledon, the football World Cup obviously, and now the Nations Championship in rugby started as well.
You could, at the moment, be sitting watching sport all day.
I’ve watched a bit of the football World Cup, including England’s win, which to be fair was a fantastic performance. They did really well.
Egypt v Argentina was also a great game, so it’s been a really great spectacle.
It’s just a shame that so much of the action this week was overshadowed by Donald Trump overturning that red card – or at least that’s the perception, anyway!
Football’s obviously different to rugby in that if you get a red card, it’s going to be a suspension for the next game. There’s no process where red cards can be rescinded through an appeal.
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Then again, the perceived inconsistency that we often see in terms of the length of bans means rugby can’t necessarily take too much of a moral high ground.
But in the case of this football World Cup, it’s not just the fact Trump has got involved in public, it’s the fact that this has never happened before.
Whether the sending off was harsh or wrong is pretty much irrelevant. The perception is now that the president of the United States has rung the president of FIFA to ensure a red card is rescinded.
It’s left football with a bit of a predicament going forward. The optics are not good, and I think it’s merely given fuel to some of the comments we’ve seen being made about the Egypt v Argentina game, where the Egyptians clearly felt some of the officiating was weighted against them.
Those sorts of complaints, on their own, are nothing new. The All Blacks, Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, Liverpool a couple of years ago, then Manchester City.
There’s always been a perception that a winning team gets treated differently to a ‘lower’ team.
I even found myself on the receiving end of those sorts of accusations.
Funnily enough, one of the times I remember involved Argentina.
I was refereeing their game against England in 2019, and showed Lavanini a red card for a tackle on Owen Farrell.
It was a nailed on red card, but I remember at the end of the game, although I don’t remember who actually said it, a member of their team had an issue after the game, and one of their players came up to me and said I refereed Argentina differently because they were “a small nation”.
My response was “hang on, there’s 15m people in Buenos Aires and 3m in Wales. So who’s the small nation here?”
That was the end of the conversation then.
So sometimes you get that sort of feeling, but it wasn’t the case that I was refereeing them differently.
It wasn’t the case at all.
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But rugby’s long had these sorts of accusations flying around, I suppose.
I remember there was a perception that Richie McCaw used to get away with things when playing for the All Blacks, but he was very good at what he did.
He knew when to step back, when not to go chasing something and when the referee might step in. Other players would carry on regardless and get a yellow card, but McCaw knew exactly what he could get away with and what he couldn’t get away with.
Other players just weren’t as smart at doing that. It wasn’t that he was being treated differently at all. But there was always that perception.
However, when people see the president of a country seemingly interfering, it gives oxygen to all sorts of conspiracy theories, and that’s clearly a problem.
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