Why do we accept the rule… and why does its transgression shock us so much?
By Idrissa Diabira, Founder Sherpafrica
The Senegal-Morocco final not only aroused sporting emotions. It provoked a deeper, almost collective disturbance. What unfolded in Rabat went beyond the score and referee decisions to touch on something much more fundamental: our relationship to the rule, order, justice, and legitimacy of contestation.
Organizational sociology reminds us of an often forgotten truth: the rule is never neutral. As Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg have shown, it is not simply a tool designed to discipline behavior or resolve conflicts. It is a mechanism for regulating power, an unstable compromise between actors in unequal positions. It is accepted as long as it maintains symbolic credibility, that is, as long as it is perceived to be applied symmetrically.
The first anger in this match arose from the Senegalese side, in the heart of the action. It emerged following a specific sequence: a disallowed goal, followed by a controversial penalty awarded to Morocco. It was a localized, immediate anger, linked to a perceived procedural injustice. It was not the anger of someone rejecting the rule, but of someone who accepts it and suddenly sees its application falter. At that moment, the rule does not disappear; it backfires. And it is this breach of symmetry that shakes the order of the game.
The ensuing transgression, particularly on the part of the Senegalese staff, can only be understood in light of this sequence. It is not a rejection of the rule per se, but a reaction to its perceived arbitrary application. It expresses a disagreement with how power is exercised through the rule. As Crozier and Friedberg had already shown, when the rule loses its perceived legitimacy, transgression ceases to be a moral anomaly and becomes an organizational symptom.
The second anger is of a different nature. It arises afterwards and in the face of defeat, from the Moroccan side – not everyone, and especially at the institutional level, notably FIFA or CAF. It does not primarily concern the initial referee decision, but rather the attitude of Senegal, accused of not accepting the rule and, more importantly, of supposedly “degrading football”.
Here, transgression is no longer interpreted as a reaction to injustice, but as a moral fault, almost as an affront to the sanctified order of the game. The debate then shifts: it is no longer the justice of the decision that is questioned, but the very legitimacy of the contestation.
At this precise moment, the question of power becomes central. Because this institutional indignation is not evenly distributed. Other protests, coming from much more powerful actors on the global football stage or elsewhere, have been tolerated, absorbed, sometimes relativized, without triggering comparable sanction intentions. This asymmetry reveals that the rule judges not only actions, but also positions.
As Jean de La Fontaine wrote in The Animals Sick of the Plague: “According to whether you are powerful or miserable, the court judgments will make you white or black.”
As Pierre Bourdieu showed, the rule is never just legal; it is also symbolic. It organizes recognition, hierarchy, and domination. When a perceived dominated actor transgresses, their gesture is never seen as a simple deviation. It is interpreted as a challenge to the order itself. What is shocking is not so much the transgression as the identity of the one daring to transgress.
The final thus brought into tension order and disorder. The order of procedures, VAR, referee decisions, and the disorder of anger, overflowing benches, and frustration finding no recognized outlet. As Michel Foucault showed, every order produces its own disorder, and every disorder often reveals a previously unjust order. Disorder is not necessarily chaos; it is sometimes the language through which an organization makes its own vulnerabilities visible.
This hierarchy of angers is not unique to football or specific to a particular country. It cuts across all contemporary democracies. France simply provides a particularly clear example of this mechanism, as the question of order, contestation, and legitimacy has historically and politically been central there. Not all angers receive the same symbolic or institutional treatment. Some, when coming from socially recognized legitimate groups (farmers), are seen as understandable, sometimes even necessary, despite strongly disrupting the established order. Others, when coming from perceived peripheral groups or already suspected of illegitimacy (suburbs, yellow vests), are quickly requalified as disorder or threat.
This differential treatment reveals a constant of social orders: the legitimacy of an anger depends less on its content than on the identity of those expressing it. The rule not only frames action; it distributes recognition, hierarchizes voices, and sets the boundaries of what can be said and heard.
This sequence finally refers to a more general law of political life and power relations. Already in Aristotle, hubris signifies the moment when force believes itself self-sufficient and confuses victory with justice. Any domination exercised without restraint sooner or later calls forth its nemesis. Force can impose obedience; it never durably founds adherence.
This sequence resonates even more strongly in an international context where force tends to become an openly assumed mode of regulation, sometimes at the expense of the legitimacy of common rules.
Whether in human mobility, access to markets, or global economic rules, transgression often appears less as a refusal of the norm than as a symptom of an order perceived as structurally inequitable.
What unfolded in Rabat, in sports as in many other spheres, is not just about who wins, but at what symbolic cost. Because the story is constant: even when victorious, the law of the strongest, or of those perceived as such, arouses rejection when not tempered by restraint, justice, and recognition of the other.
That evening, football spoke as an organization – regardless of the final result.
And the people, they understood.
Idrissa Diabira, Founder Sherpafrica
www.sherpafrica.com
