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Last week, FIFA suspended a one-match ban on the US’s top scorer after President Trump personally called the FIFA president to ask for a “review.” FIFA subsequently granted an appeal.

That’s the whole disease in miniature. Not “we disagreed with the call, so we’re contesting it through the process.” Instead: work the relationship, apply pressure at the top, get the outcome you want, and let the paperwork catch up later.

American business talks like a locker room — we “run plays,” “move the goalposts,” “quarterback the deal,” “keep our eye on the ball.” Originally, sports metaphors implied teamwork, discipline, and playing by the rules.

That vocabulary came from somewhere real: a culture that once believed you could lose fair and still be building something.

But somewhere along the way, losing got redefined as unacceptable, and if losing is unacceptable, winning stops being something you earn and becomes something you procure — through leverage, charm, intimidation, or the right relationship at the right altitude.

Citi is a useful mirror here because it’s uniquely documented.

Since 2013, it’s paid more than $1.5 billion in US regulatory fines for lapses in risk management and related failures, including a $400 million joint penalty from the Fed and OCC in 2020 over compliance and data-governance deficiencies.

CEO Jane Fraser has been candid about the root cause: decades of underinvestment left the bank with siloed teams solving the same problems different ways, fragmented technology, manual controls, and a weak first line of defense.

None of that is a scoreboard problem. It’s a foundation problem, patched over and over so the quarterly number still says “win.”

That’s the Ponzi logic hiding in “win at all costs”: you’re not resolving the underlying problem, you’re refinancing it — borrowing credibility from tomorrow to cover a shortfall today.

It works, right up until the day it doesn’t, and by then the people who built the actual fix have long since been pushed out for asking uncomfortable questions.

Real competition — the kind sports is actually supposed to model — requires tolerating the chance that you lose on the merits.

When an institution stops tolerating fair losses, it loses the ability to build robust, honest systems — whatever CFO [REDACATED] might say, who published on LinkedIn that Citi “moved from proving it has the right to compete to demonstrating, consistently and confidently, that it has a right to win.”

This is how power operates when accountability is bypassed.