Belgium used skill, hard-work and mastery of a craft to slap down corruption, graft and cheating. Today is a good day.

13:11, Tue, Jul 7, 2026 Updated: 13:13, Tue, Jul 7, 2026

FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw

Donald Trump and World Cup Trophy which will not be going to the USA (Image: Getty)

Just when you thought this World Cup couldn’t throw up a better result than England 3 - Mexico 2, along comes USA 1 - Belgium 4. It was a spectacular, glorious, thrilling rebuff to cheating US President Donald Trump which made you feel there’s still some justice in the world. Schadenfruede? Good god yes!

At the final whistle in Seattle I was beaming almost as much as the final whistle in the England game. Bully-boy America doesn’t always get its own way - and thank god for that. Trump’s ego has always been his downfall, but that ego has now clearly transformed into a full-on Messiah-complex.

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There is no other way to process the cosmic levels of narcissism the man betrayed over-turning a World Cup rule. Like most Americans Trump has no understanding of, connection with, or love for association football, as we know it. But the man genuinely buys into the idea he truly rules the world, and everyone and everything in it.

Just what did he think he was doing leaning on Infantino because he didn’t like a decision going against America?

Well, pretty much what he was doing in Iran a few short weeks ago actually. A stupid, wholly ill-thought out, foot-stamping, tantrum.

And the result there? Pretty much 4-1 Iran I’d say.

Despite Trump throwing his weight around like the school bully who thinks he’s untouchable America got a proper spanking.

They lost the football too.

And, thanks to the be-wigged one’s crassness, America’s moral standing in the world has collapsed even further today.

Not only can they seemingly do nothing against a nation with an economy less than one percent of its own but they now look like a dumbass bunch of cheats in the eyes of the world.

Iran responded to the US’s billions of dollars worth of military hardware with cleverness - it closed the Strait of Hormuz and held the world to ransom, leaving the world to blame Donald Trump. Net result, Trump backs down and Tehran's Islamo-fascists’ stranglehold on Iran is intensified, while America looks both inept and morally redundant.

Which is of course how the Belgians made the US team look this morning.

Which is unfortunate for the 11 American lads on the field - even the striker Folarin Balogun at the centre of the Trump/FIFA debacle - who clearly wanted to play football rather than become a political football.

But that aside, today is a good day. For football and for the world really.

And oddly we have Belgium to thank.

With four goals, and a humiliation of the US, they have not just shone a spotlight on Trump’s well-documented galactic hubris, but FIFA’s long and shameful history of corruption.

Indeed if you look up the word corruption in a dictionary you’ll see the FIFA emblem, so long has it been a byword for jaw-dropping graft and utter contempt for the paying football fan. So confident are they that they have the fans across the world by the nuts. FIFA rarely even bothers hiding it anymore.

So and endless list of allegations of bribery, voting scandals, kickbacks, wire-fraud, money laundering and and prison sentences are shrugged off as business as usual.

Honorary Englishman Jurgen Klopp today blasted FIFA (and the US) saying: “This is our sport, not theirs.”

And he’s right.

So thanks Belgium.

To almost quote JFK, today “je suis un Belge”.