Football

As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter warmed up for the first game of the Mauricio Pochettino era.Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent soccer pundit retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy that surfaced in an attempt to make the former president appear hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.The jarring mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among soccer broadcasters for his open engagement with the imminent American presidential election and for his party affiliation.Lalas gave an interview on the Fox Business channel in July from the Republican National Convention which careened from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion of the Barcelona prodigy Lamine Yamal. Speaking on Fox News radio from the convention, Lalas said he wants to challenge “the stereotype that exists when it comes to Republicans and certainly the right side of the political spectrum … I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics out there and yet there are a lot of things that can unite us.”To judge by the volume of online abuse he attracts and airs on X – and to which he often responds with wit and generosity – his political output is having the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, such as Lalas’ recent rehashing of video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to fawning supporters at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in a specious attempt to taunt Harris.The ginger-bearded face of American soccer in the 1990s, a defender and rock musician who played in Serie A and won 96 caps for the USMNT, Lalas played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and became, wrote The Los Angeles Times, “the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retirement he worked as an MLS executive, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.The mellow, mumbling kid who let David Letterman trim his pumpkin-hued goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old greying purveyor of indignant tirades for Fox Sports, proudly repping a segment of society who equate the profundity of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and Stripes flags and the decibel level of their bellowing about American greatness.With viral clips often attracting more views than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is clear value in being the blowtorch of hot-take merchants. Given the sonic vanilla that is the corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS on Apple TV, there may be a market for a celebrated American personality who provides and provokes trenchant opinions. But does that hold true when the talk moves from Pochettino’s right-wing to that of the GOP?“When you’re in the entertainment sector, going political tends to have very little upside because this country seems to be perpetually split, 49 to 48, and just in general it’s not going to make one side love you more because they’re just looking at what you’re doing on the field and in the announcer booth. But it will set off the other side,” says Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports supporters.Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose soccer podcast is called State of the Union in a nod to the president’s annual address, has more than 400,000 followers on X. “It’s my channel. I program it with what I like and what I find interesting. If it offends your sensibilities, there are millions of other channels for you to choose from. Go in peace,” Lalas wrote this month to a reader baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary – an unusually coy style for him.That’s true for social media. But given his centrality to Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to swerve Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in the sport. And given how polarised and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliation has become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they divorce that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s purely talking soccer? Do liberals want to hear a verdict on Christian Pulisic from Lalas any more than they want to buy a Tesla from the Trump super-booster Elon Musk?View image in fullscreen“It’s almost like a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s an enemy now, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I watch the US men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being perceived as bucking the liberal consensus as an unafraid and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep blue Los Angeles in a progressive-leaning sport historically disparaged by conservatives.Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US were too woke after they went out of last year’s Women’s World Cup, and did not deviate from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet when NWSL players took the knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party’s widespread antipathy towards diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflicts with the mission statement of the US Soccer Federation, which declares, “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.There is a balancing act in playing a high-profile role in a mainstream channel – Fox, after all, has the rights to the 2026 World Cup – then sliding into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found audiences by stoking grievances and trolling the libs. One recent Lalas repost reads: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and seeing who Alexi ticked off today”.Fox Sports and Lalas declined to comment for this article. Like Fox News, Fox Sports is part of the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and family. So is the conservative-leaning sports news site, Outkick, which vows to question “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often cites Lalas.Politics and soccer are far from strangers. Two of the UK’s leading soccer broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, drew ire from British right-wingers for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football programme in 2023 for tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster said breached impartiality rules.The American landscape, however, has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on X and the network introduced a social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and offering commentary beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems blinkered. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, frequently opines on politics on other platforms and recently sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks politics, as does Dan LeBatard, who started his own podcast after criticisms of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.“There’s a price to pay for it. That’s why it is so hard to figure out the right policy, it’s very challenging to sort through what is a restriction on someone’s free speech” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation, says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive.“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”Though political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have overtly revealed political stances, perceptions of partisanship have become ingrained. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas’ annual Politics in Sports Media report. “This suggests that the sports networks are reputationally connected to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs compared with only 42% of Democrats.The line has also blurred between voters and spectators. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events where you can have guys essentially face-painted up, they’ve got the red hats, the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there’s really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, particularly in the way fandom is so closely related to people’s identities.”The subordination of issues to identity and policies to personality means affiliations are ossified and compromise impossible, with Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting Republicans than would a Liverpool fan change allegiance to Manchester United. “If I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone a question, ‘who are you a fan of,’ if they start to tell me two teams, there’s almost a reaction: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.“I think of it all as culture at this point. There’s almost this seamless connection across all these categories, entertainment to sports to politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they are all happening simultaneously and all affecting each other.” Strangely, when everything is linked it feels like everything is fractured.Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, stances, & behavior have made this team unlikeable to a portion of America.” Well, they could respond: right back at ya. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his X feed, focuses on one team’s shirt-pulling while ignoring the two-footed tackles flying in from the other side, and hails the “authenticity” of a serial liar and flip-flopper.More broadly, though, in a climate where it’s standard that politicians speak out on sports and countless celebrities issue political opinions and endorsements, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we feel Lalas should keep quiet, shouldn’t we also feel that way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often conceived and performed as explicit political statements while sports have been treated as a break from reality, not a reflection of it. That’s no longer sustainable as social media entangles news and opinion, the public and the personal. Wisely or not, Lalas isn’t only opposing a liberal consensus, he’s contributing to the erasure of a naive illusion. More