It may be quirky for Americans to hear this, but one pivotal moment when it truly dawned on the average european citizen how corrupt the US has become, was when Trump phoned Infantino to drop a red card during the world cup. Blatant corruption for zero gain that even the Putin's and Xi Jin Pings never attempted. Any toddler could see how wrong it was and it was felt deeply in many hearts.

Needless to say trust is close to 0% throughout the population - even the right wing populists distance themselves from Trump - and this is the consequence. I fear we are heading into dangerous times.

Unironically true. The average person could care less about following politics, but Europeans live football.

> Blatant corruption for zero gain that even the Putin's and Xi Jin Pings never attempted.... was when Trump phoned Infantino to drop a red card during the world cup.

FIFA, a largely European organization created by Europeans for a sport that Americans barely care about and in the center of multiple corruption scandals and controversies over the last few decades and you're really going to sit here and try to tell others that the real wakeup call was when Trump made a phone call to ask that a star player who by many respects shouldn't have received a red card over at best a technicality in the first place be reinstated for the good of sport and competition...?

And you're also going to claim that this "level of corruption" is something Vladimir Putin or Xi Jingping and their corrupt authoritarian regimes would never dream of attempting?

I guess Donald Trump's phone call was the real last straw, and something like, idk, 6,500 migrant workers in Qatar dying to construct World Cup facilities is just another day at the anti-corruption office? [1]

I'm going to assume you're being sarcastic...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

To add to this, because I think it is important context for Americans who may not be aware, football is seen very officially by many European nations and national governments as a cultural counterpart to many international treaties within Europe that were born out of the desire to bring our respective cultures closer together after the second world war.

It is so important, that many countries make it illegal to hide international football matches behind paywalls, specifically.

It is so important, that there are articles written about its importance on EU institutes websites. For example, this one reflects on Footballs importance in relation to the First, Second and Cold wars. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/alerts/european-footb...

To see Trump so flagrantly manipulate it sends a cultural signal that is hard for those outside of Europe to see, and that by some can be seen as the cultural equivalent of the political threats Trump has made against NATO.

At this point, your average European Trump supporter/right wing populist needs only reminding of Trumps interference to get a complete positional change - that's how bad it is.

[dead]

Nah it was an egregiously bad call by itself, and then the slow-mo VAR was used to justify it which is also against their own rules. So they corrected a mistake that could have severely impacted the result and integrity of the rest of the games.

But yeah, people got upset...