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A message is displayed in Ukrainian colours above the crowd ahead of the English League Cup final between Chelsea and Liverpool at Wembley Stadium, in London, England, on Feb. 27.JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

With geo-political norms changing so quickly, some people find themselves living in a different world than others.

On Sunday, soccer’s world governing body was still living in the pre-Feb. 24 world. FIFA announced that as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, Russia would be stripped of its right to wear its colours, fly its flag and hear its anthem.

Meanwhile, the three countries Russia was set to face in the final round of qualifying for November’s World Cup were living in the post-Feb. 24 world.

Poland was the first to announce that it would not play Russia under any circumstances. Sweden followed suit. The Czech Republic finished the trifecta.

Shortly after that, England – which does not have any games against Russia scheduled – also said it was joining the boycott.

For a moment, there was a possible future in which a flagless Russia would qualify automatically, see every team it was due to face forfeit and win World Cup 2022 having never played a game.

This is what happens when you play whack-a-mole with a superpower – it starts to look like the Road Runner and you start looking ridiculous. After a while, you get used to being ridiculous and so continue on with your ridiculous ways. Until finally, the other participants in the game pull the mallet out of your hand and begin beating you with it.

The possibility of a general revolt sharpened a lot of dull minds.

The International Olympic Committee has its own PR disaster to deal with – the Paralympics, due to start on Friday. It’s too late to ban anyone, so the IOC did the next best thing – it asked everyone else to ban Russia.

FIFA, now desperate, jumped on the suggestion. Less than 24 hours after letting Russia get away with it again, FIFA barred it from all international soccer competitions.

We’ve been playing this game of footsie with Russia for nearly a decade, but it took only two days to achieve the end game. If Russia wants to play games in the coming years, it’s going to have to play with itself. It will become to the 21st century what South Africa was to the 20th – a sporting pariah.

If things continue as they are, the next step will be the slow weeding out of those Russian pros who will not distance themselves from the Russian regime. NHL players under contract are probably okay – unless one or more of them start popping off on social media.

But if all those top tennis players want to keep on swanning around the world, flashing peace signs and mumbling about how hard this is for everyone involved is not going to cut it. Unlike NHL teams, tennis tournaments have sponsors to think about.

We are in the midst of culling Russian influence from Western cultural sectors, of which sports is the most visible. A week ago, we might’ve said that such a thing is unfair. Today, the us from a week ago looks like a real Pollyanna.

Now that it’s falling apart, a few things about the way the sports world has wrangled with Russia over the past decade have become clear.

First, that sanctions weren’t just ineffective, but counter-productive. The IOC’s doormat routine in the face of the Russian belligerence must have bled over to into the latter’s foreign policy thinking. It fixed a whole Olympics and the IOC’s collective response was “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

It would have been better had it done nothing at all, then give the impression that this was the best payback we could come up with.

Second, that the utopian dream of a world permanently connected and pacified by sport is becoming impossible.

During the most provocative moments of the Soviet regime – the stamping out of the Hungarian revolution, the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan – it was still welcome at the Olympics and the World Cup. I guess there didn’t seem to be much point in holding an “international” sporting event if one half of the world’s ruling order wasn’t invited.

Now a new precedent is being set – if you invade your sovereign neighbours, you can take your ball and go home.

Does it feel to you like that sort of thing is going to be happening less or more in the next little while? There could be noticeably fewer athletes at the next Olympics in Paris.

Third, that international sport is transforming from a carrot into a stick. This goes against every capitalistic instinct of the bodies that control sport – and that would mean all their instincts, since the whole edifice is girded by the love of money.

But pride is proving a more powerful motivator than greed. FIFA must have seriously thought it could explain to Poland how playing a flagless Russian team was good for everyone’s bottom line. And then Poland explained back to FIFA that it had had a little epiphany when it comes to the country that put it under its heel for 50 years.

If you were a top Polish footballer, which do you think gains you more glory – playing Russia in a forgettable game, or being one of the guys who took a principled stand on behalf of the world’s free peoples? The more they punished you, the greater your glory.

We have spent recent years emboldening athletes to speak out on all sorts of political issues. Here is their golden opportunity. For the first time in history, the bold-face names on either side of a possible global conflagration all work for the same people at the same offices. Not much is ever new, but that is.

As those forces begin realigning, the power is shifting inside sports organizations. It’s moving away from administrators and toward member nations and, through them, to individual athletes. There is no longer enough bait on the hook to keep the IOC, FIFA, et al from tilting fully into politics. From now on, international sports is for friends only.

If anyone in Zurich starts issuing fiats to the contrary, I’m not sure sports will be based in Zurich for very much longer.

In terms of what actually matters, sports only features in good times. That’s why people like sports so much. But in bad times, sports can give you a general sense of where things are headed.

In that regard, the last couple of days indicate a direction – downward – and a speed faster than the people in charge can manage.

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