Sticking to Sports

The World Cup is over, and Spain has emerged victorious. A great outcome for me personally, a woman who just learned who Lamine Yamal was like 6 months ago from my soccer-obsessed nephew. I wouldn’t call myself a huge soccer fan, although I did play my entire childhood through high school. I wasn’t good, and I was in an active beef with my coach Brian, who hated me, because I was a teenaged bitch, and he never let me play. But also I didn’t want to play. And one time I ran into a goal post and hit my head and had to go through whatever the public school version of a concussion protocol was. Also, my senior year of high school, I became the manager for the boys’ varsity team, but I think I was listed as a player, which means I think I technically lettered in boys’ varsity soccer.

These days, I don’t engage with men’s soccer much, especially not our national team, which appears to be made up mostly of nepo babies and British guys (no offense, they do seem nice!), but this year was a different story.

First of all, I should address the elephant in the room: Swamp Person is, technically, a politics newsletter. And soccer is, famously, a sport. But watching the tournament unfold this year felt like a real gift, especially as things here in the United States deteriorate precipitously. Trump has entered this country into a war no one asked for and that Congress never authorized, has destroyed the reflecting pool and torn down half the White House, is weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after the voter rolls in all 50 states as part of his escalating war against the very concept of democracy, and…apparently rigging a civics competition for teens so a Sikh contestant wouldn’t win.

But the World Cup gave us a peek into what the world could be like if there weren’t multibillion dollar efforts directed at keeping us all apart. One of my favorites was the love story between the Algerian national team and Lawrence, Kansas. The Algerian squad found themselves based in Lawrence for practices, and instead of being met with the vitriol our nation’s leaders proudly reserve for foreigners, the team was met with residents lining the streets with signs, swapping friendship bracelets, neighbors heading to open practices, and a very pure display of the cultural exchange that the Trump Administration, with its violent, thuggish immigration policies, is so desperate to shut down.

It was beautiful. All the videos my algorithm served me were more beautiful than the last, including a montage of international fans eating all kinds of American fast food for the first time. I went to “like” one of these videos before noticing the caption. It said “decades of anti-american propaganda obliterated in one summer” over a picture of a bunch of World Cup fans eating barbecue. It was posted by the Daily Wire, the right-wing media outlet run by famed cryptid Ben Shapiro. I recoiled. Was all this World Cup-related goodwill just a right-wing psy-op?

Of course, the propaganda of it all is probably why Trump wanted to host the World Cup in the first place, which FIFA awarded to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico during his first term in 2018. Trump, an entertainer first and foremost, understands this: sports hold massive power over us all and they’re integral to our culture, even if you don’t watch them. International competitions are especially hard to ignore, which is why when countries bid to host the Olympic or the World Cup, it’s not just because they love track and field or even because of the economic boost to their countries. It’s because these events offer massive opportunities to engage in a public relations campaign for the home nation -- and these PR goals range from boosting tourism to presenting a lie to the world that your country’s human rights abuse record is overblown, or that your president isn’t some sort of demented maniac who shits himself.

The latter pretty well explains why MAGA wanted the World Cup to be hosted here, despite soccer’s reputation (at least in the States!) as being an effete, liberal-coded sport for elites who rebuke the brutality of the NFL. This is why the “STICK TO SPORTS!!!” contingent has made this a mantra. Athletes are powerful, and athletes with opinions that run contrary to the MAGA regime are dangerous. It matters when an athlete like Kylian Mbappé speaks out against the far-right in France, or calls out a Paraguayan politician for egregious racism. Or when Lamine Yamal carries a Palestinian flag at the UEFA European Championship parade. Athletes are, like all of us, affected by political decisions and political choices. That’s why the right is so vociferous in its demand for global superstars to stick to sports -- there are few people more powerful in the cultural consciousness than athletes.

All of this was coming up for me while watching the World Cup. Unlike a lot of (much smarter people), I didn’t watch on Telemundo, I watched on Fox Sports, which is still owned by Murdoch spawn. What can I say, I fell in love fast and hard with Zlatan Ibrahimović, a Swedish player I’d literally never heard of before June, who was hired as an analyst by Fox alongside Thierry Henry, Rebecca Lowe, and the dreaded Alexi Lalas. Like, how could I say no to this?

Forgive me, but I love him!! And he seemingly dislikes Alexi Lalas as much as the rest of us! If you’ve followed soccer in the past or if you’re on social media at all, you’ll recall that Alexi Lalas is a widely loathed former American soccer player lacks both the analytical skill and charisma to operate as a successful commentator on television, but was nevertheless picked to haunt our television screens during major soccer tournaments because he tweets shit like this:

Alexi Lalas@AlexiLalas

Yup, I'm a supporter of President Trump and I love what he's done to secure our border and address illegal immigration. But I can still acknowledge the negative perception it may create and the impact re some potential World Cup visitors. Of course what I feel is good long-term

Thornbill9 @thornbill9

@AlexiLalas @awfulannouncing You are however a supporter of the president who ran on this immigration strategy and thus deserve to be held responsible for all of its consequences

4:59 PM · Sep 10, 2025 · 152K Views

100 Replies · 17 Reposts · 836 Likes

Somehow this is sticking to sports. Somehow…this isn’t the same politics that Lalas listed as the reason why the U.S. women’s national team got knocked out of the World Cup early in 2023, claiming that the women players’ off-field political advocacy made them “unlikeable.” When the men’s team lost this year in the knockout round to Belgium, Lalas offered no similar remonstrations about politics as a distraction that leads to losses -- despite the fact that the men’s team was knocked out after one of the most blatant political interferences with a sporting event I have ever witnessed in my life: Donald Trump reaching out personally to FIFA President Gianni Infantino and demanding the organization overturn Folarin Balogun’s red card so that he could play against Belgium. This action thrust poor Balogun, who quite literally did nothing wrong here, along with his teammates, into an ugly political conflict centered around our doddering, narcissistic freak of a president, who later admitted he had no idea what a red card even is. Whatever goodwill we had built up with our Wendy’s Baconators had seemingly dissipated after Trump’s intervention.

This isn’t some groundbreaking new idea or anything, that of course sports are political as are the people who play them, but this attempt to draw a distinction between sports and politics this year felt even more tone deaf than years past. At the same time we were all falling in love with social media videos of international soccer fans trying ribs for the first time, or discovering free refills, or with the most famous soccer player in the world buying a stuffed drunk raccoon in Texas and bringing him to Norway, the Trump administration was refusing entry to a Somali FIFA referee, searching the Uruguayan team bus with dogs, and refusing to allow the Iranian national team to stay in the United States after their matches here.

Oh yeah, and on top of everything else, it’s America’s 250th birthday, which means that the politics permeated the commercial breaks, too. I must have seen this rancid Dana White Dodge Ram commercial 900 million times, wherein White proclaims Paul Revere’s “The British are Coming” as “the first great American yell”:

Actually, the first great American yell hasn’t happened yet; it will take place when I launch myself, wild-eyed and with my nails unsheathed, at Dana White himself, clawing at his face and screaming for relief from this goddamn loser ass cheese-dick truck commercial.

So anyway, was this World Cup, and in turn the U.S.’s role as host, all just a pro-America psy-op perpetrated by the CIA? Probably? But it was also a glance at the true nature of Americans, I think. I hope. The right-wing wants me to believe that “Real Americans” hate immigrants and others who are different. It seems apparent to me now that I am being lied to regularly about the hearts and minds of midwesterners. What is true to me now is that America, as a concept, and as place run by the worst people alive, kinda sucks and is widely disliked by most reasonable people. But Americans, as a people, are mostly good. We are redeemable. We like other people. We are mostly nice. We want to know more about what goes on in Algeria. The efforts to close our hearts to the outside world have not fully succeeded. And I’d say that’s a pretty good American yell.