What FIFA’s Folarin Balogun Decision Teaches Employers About Fairness and Exceptions

By Benjamin A. Nucci

When an employee is disciplined, managers sometimes pick up the phone and call human resources (HR).

Sometimes they’re right to do it. New evidence may have surfaced. The policy may have been misapplied. The punishment may simply not fit the facts.

Other times, however, the request has nothing to do with fairness. It stems from a desire to protect a valuable employee from consequences everyone else would face. That tension recently played out on one of the world’s biggest stages.

After FIFA reversed Folarin Balogun’s World Cup suspension, fans quickly divided into two camps. One viewed the decision as correcting a mistake. The other saw it as granting a special exception to a star player after the fact. Reasonable people can disagree about which view is correct.

For employers, however, the debate raises a familiar question: when does correcting a perceived injustice create the appearance of favoritism?

That question is far more common in the workplace than many managers realize.

Every organization eventually faces pressure to revisit a disciplinary decision. The challenge is distinguishing between correcting a mistake and making an exception.

HR serves an important role as a check on the disciplinary process. Its job is to ensure that disciplinary decisions are accurate, consistent, and compliant with company policy and the law. That responsibility sometimes requires correcting mistakes. It also requires resisting pressure to create exceptions that cannot be justified by the facts.

When discipline is revisited, the organization should be able to explain why. Was there new evidence? Was the policy misapplied? Was there a procedural error?

If the answer is yes, revisiting the decision strengthens the integrity of the disciplinary system. If the answer is simply that someone wanted a different result, the organization risks undermining confidence in the very policies it seeks to enforce.

Whether you’re officiating a World Cup match or managing a workplace, people are more likely to accept an unfavorable outcome when they trust the process that produced it. Every decision — and every exception — should be grounded in the facts, not the identity of the person involved.