As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter geared up for the first match of the Mauricio Pochettino era.
Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent football expert retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy has surfaced in an attempt to make the former president look hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.
The shocking mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among football broadcasters for his open involvement in the upcoming US presidential elections and for his party affiliation.
Lalas gave one interview on the Fox Business channel in July, from the Republican National Convention, which ranged from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion about Barcelona wunderkind Lamine Yamal. Speaking Fox News Radio of 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 football, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to Being There many things that can unite us.”
Judging by the volume of online abuse he attracts and broadcasts on X – and to which he often responds with humor and generosity – his political output has the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, like Lalas’ recently ruminate of a video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to groveling supporters at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania in a misleading attempt to taunt Harris.
Lalas, the red-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, played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and was, wrote the Los Angeles Times“the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retiring, he worked as an MLS manager, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.
The soft, mumbling child who allowed that David Letterman cuts his pumpkin-colored goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old graying purveyor of outraged tirades for Fox Sports, which proudly represents a segment of society that equates the depth of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and stripes flags and the decibel level of their roar about American greatness.
Since viral clips often attract more viewers than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is obvious value in being the blowtorch of the hot-take traders. Given the sonic vanilla that is Apple TV’s corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS, perhaps there is a market out there for a celebrated American personality to deliver and provoke sharp opinions. But does that also apply if the discussion moves from Pochettino’s right wing to that of the Republican party?
“If you’re in entertainment, there’s generally little benefit to going political because this country seems to be perpetually divided, from 49 to 48. watching what you do on the field and in the broadcast booth. But it will start the other side,” says Mike Lewisprofessor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports fans.
Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose football podcast is called State of the Union, a nod to the president’s annual speech, 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 to choose from. Go in peace, ‘Lalas wrote this month to a reader who was baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary — an unusually restrained style for him.
This applies to social media. But given his central role in Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to steer clear of Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in sports. And given how polarized and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliations have become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they separate that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s talking purely about football? Don’t liberals want judgment on Lalas’ Christian Pulisic any more than they want? buy a Tesla from Trump super booster Elon Musk?
“It’s almost a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s now an enemy, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I’m watching the U.S. men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being seen as running counter to the liberal consensus as a fearless and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep-blue Los Angeles in a progressive sport historically discredited by conservatives.
Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US was too too awake after abandoning the Women’s World Cup last year, and not deviating from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet as NWSL players took a knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party is widespread antipathy Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflict with the U.S. Soccer Federation’s mission statement, which states: “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.
It’s a balancing act to play a prominent role on a mainstream broadcaster — Fox has the rights to the 2026 World Cup, after all — and then slide into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found an audience by airing grievances. stoke and troll the libs. One recent Lala’s repost states: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and see who ticked Alexi 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. This also applies to the conservatively oriented sports news site Outkick to question vows “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often quotes Lalas.
Politics and football are far from strangers. Two of Britain’s top football broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, angered British right-wing parties for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football program in 2023 over tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster had broadcast. said that impartiality rules had been violated.
However, the American landscape has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and commenting beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems to be a matter of wearing blinders. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, often thinks about politics on other platforms and recently saved with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks about politics, as it happens Dan LeBatardwho then started his own podcast criticism of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.
“There is a price to be paid. That’s why it’s so difficult to come up with the right policy. Determining what constitutes a restriction on someone’s freedom of expression” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation is a major challenge, said Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former director of Fox Sports.
“One of the reasons why a lot of big sports personalities don’t do that [talk politics] is because you’re a very generic market, and do you really want to take 50% of the people who see you and fight them, or alienate them, or make them feel uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I think it was neutral ground. That has changed more and more.”
While political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have openly revealed political positions, the perception of partisanship has become entrenched. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas annual study. Politics in Sports Media Report. “This suggests that the sports networks have a reputation tied to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs, compared to just 42% of Democrats.
The line between voters and spectators has also been blurred. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events, where you can essentially have guys put on their face paint, they have the red hats and the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there are really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, especially in the way fandom is so closely tied to people’s identities.”
The subordination of issues to identity and policy to personality means that bonds are fossilized and compromise is impossible, with the Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting the Republicans than a Liverpool fan is to switch his allegiance to Manchester United would change. “When I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone the question, ‘Who are you a fan of?’ and when they tell me two teams, there’s almost a response: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.
“I look at it all as culture at this point. There is almost a seamless connection between all these categories, from entertainment to sports and politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they all happen at the same time and they all influence each other.” Strangely, when everything is connected, it feels like everything is broken.
Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, positions and behavior have made this team unpleasant to a segment of America.” Well, they might respond: right back to you. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his ignores two-legged tackles that fly in from the other side. and greets the “authenticity” of one serial liar And flip flop.
But more broadly, in a climate where it is the norm for politicians to speak out about sports and countless other matters celebrities express political opinions and statements of support, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we think Lalas should shut up, shouldn’t we also feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?
One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often understood and performed as explicit political statements, while sports are treated as a break with reality and not as a reflection of it. This is no longer sustainable because social media intertwine news and opinion, public and personal. Wise or not, Lalas not only opposes a liberal consensus, he also contributes to the erasure of a naive illusion.