I understand that you are probably not going to believe me when I say this, but I swear it’s true: There was a moment when Alexi Lalas was almost cool.
I know. I know. If the first fortnight of the World Cup has taught us anything, it is that Lalas, the lone American broadcaster on Fox’s primary World Cup coverage team, cursed to sit across two soccer legends in Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, has become the most beleaguered public figure in sports; saying anything positive about Lalas right now is a little like being pro-algae.
This, it should be said, is for good reason. Lalas’s commentary, if that’s what you want to call it, has had the effect of sticking shivs in the cerebral cortices of die-hard U.S. soccer fans like me for more than a decade. He’s uninformed, he’s loud, he’s obnoxious, but more than anything else, he’s smug: He’s constantly wearing a smirk that seems to say, doesn’t it drive you crazy that I’m on television right now? On that, if only that, he has always been right.
Yet on our screens he has remained, for one reason: Because in 1994, we thought he was kind of cool. And he kinda was? When the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, we were an infant of a soccer country, and like an infant, we were easily distracted by shiny objects and dangling keys. Lalas was that — a frizzy-haired, goateed Gen X dude with the manner of someone always trying to sell you on the unrealized economic and restorative power of hemp.
He wasn’t one of the best players on that team — not by a long shot; I’ll forever be a Cobi Jones superfan — but he was the most unmissable. As he and his hair bounced around the pitch, you watched him like a cat following a laser pointer. As a 19-year-old kid who owned a disturbingly high number of Nirvana bootlegs, I was drawn to him. I was hardly alone: He was, unquestionably, the breakout star of that World Cup team. That made him a U.S. soccer star forever, regardless of the quality of his play or, really, the reactionary, mostly simpering pundit he became. The ironic dude-bro-ness of Lalas’s persona in 1994 — one, as a Gen Xer myself, I was not immune to — has curdled, in middle age, into self-satisfaction. Lalas seems to enjoy being on television more than he enjoys soccer, leading him to favor limp “hot takes” more than analysis: He’s less interested in providing insight than he is in getting a rise out of you.
But remember: That 1994 World Cup was everything for soccer in the U.S.. It was the most heavily attended World Cup ever — a record that has stood until, surely, this year — and was the big bang that launched soccer in this country, leading to the creation of Major League Soccer. After fits and starts, the MLS has become popular enough that Lionel Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time — and maybe still, at 39, the greatest playing today — plays in it. Over the past 32 years, American interest in soccer has gone from barely having European leagues earn a mention in U.S. newspapers to every major Euro league, from the Premier League to Serie A to La Liga, being available for any fan to watch as avidly as they do the NFL. (So much so that broadcasters fight for the right to show them.) In 1994, the best players in the world considered the U.S. market a joke; now they’re desperate to be part of it.
That is, after all, why Henry and Ibrahimovic — again, two absolute legends — are on the Fox set with Lalas in the first place, spending so much time (amusingly) making fun of him for not being near their quality of player: The U.S. is big-time now. This is where those stars want to be seen. And there’s every reason to think this World Cup — which, for all the worries leading up to it, has been a smashing, almost overwhelming success — will be the next big bang in this country’s soccer evolution.
This is even more true because of the success of this year’s U.S. men’s national team, which looked fantastic and exciting in a way it never has (and certainly didn’t in 1994) on the way to winning its group and advancing to its first knockout-stage match next week. The talent level of soccer players in this country has exploded in the past 32 years. Imagine what it will do in the next 32 years, after all this.
And when we are looking for stars, and idols, from this year’s team in the decades to come, we won’t have to settle for some guy who has a red goatee. We’ll be able to pick from U.S. players who are excelling across the globe, in the best leagues, from Christian Pulisic to Folarin Balogun to Weston McKennie. Heck, someday we may end up not needing to import a GOAT like Messi: We’ll have minted our own. We’ll have our soccer Jeter, our soccer LeBron, our soccer Brady.
That’s what this World Cup, this glorious tournament, is setting in motion. It will someday seem ridiculous that our signature soccer personality was someone as middling as Alexi Lalas. He was once what we had to settle for. That’s probably not a legacy Lalas would necessarily want to claim. But I’m not sure it isn’t, in its own way, worth being at least a little bit proud of. I’d be curious to hear what he has to say about that, but I’d have to take him off mute first.
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