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Say What You Will About Alexi Lalas the Pundit, but this Career Erasure is Disingenuous
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If you’ve watched any of this World Cup on FOX, you’ve no doubt encountered the studio panel of Rebecca Lowe, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and Alexi Lalas. The group includes a respected and veteran British broadcaster, two foreign legends of the game, and then a conservative American who has always been a lightning rod for various reasons, be it his strong and oftentimes contrarian opinions, or his off-brand politics.
There’s been a lot of discussion about this crew. Some people think the chemistry is off, or that Henry and Zlatan straight up don’t like Lalas. They may not even respect him. There’s chatter that Alexi doesn’t belong on the panel because his career doesn’t stack up, which was more or less summarized in a viral Guardian takedown piece from some guy named Aaron Timms (my emphasis in bold):
We all know someone like Alexi Lalas. He’s the ranter whose rants never actually say anything, the life of the party at the party no one enjoys attending, the “big personality” who’s always misjudging the size of the room. He’s corporate America’s idea of a fun guy, the type of workplace “character” whose business trip hangover never stops him from being first at the hotel breakfast buffet, hair wet, Untuckit shirt untucked. He would absolutely dominate karaoke night at a conference on infrastructure finance. If only this were the limit of Alexi Lalas’s actual impact on the world, our culture would live in blessed ignorance of his existence. But in the real world Alexi Lalas is not a small-time menace working the floor at an infrastructure conference. In the real world Alexi Lalas is American soccer’s brightest media star, and he is everywhere this World Cup.
Lalas enjoyed a solid playing career, but he’s obviously not in the same league as Henry, widely considered the greatest footballer in Premier League history. This vast gulf in on-field pedigree has become more awkward as the tournament has progressed, with Lalas retreating into a meek silence whenever Henry reveals his depth of footballing experience. In a conversation where his co-panelist is casually reminiscing about his days playing alongside Messi or exchanging shirts with Ronaldo Nazário at the World Cup, what exactly is Lalas going to talk about – coming on as a second-half substitute for Earnie Stewart in a friendly against Scotland in 1998? Helping the Kansas City Wizards finish last in the 1999 MLS Western Conference? Did Lalas enjoy an elite playing career? No. But does he do the background reading that could compensate for his relative lack of standing in a conversation with titans like Henry and Zlatan? Also no. But is he charming or funny or charismatic or otherwise magnetic on screen? Eh, no.
That second paragraph makes little sense because the author starts by admitting that Lalas had a “solid” playing career, then he proceeds to shit all over that playing career by bringing up low points like a 1998 friendly and the 1999 MLS season.
In truth, Lalas was a pretty good player for his era. He was a rugged center back, strong in the air and physical. He was an old school defender, not technically proficient or mobile, but he was hard-nosed and he got stuck in. This is a guy who played almost 100 games for the United States and began his international career before Major League Soccer was even created. He started and played 90 minutes in every single game during the 1994 World Cup before becoming the first American to play in Italy’s Serie A, and while his Padova team of the mid-90s was not exactly prime Juventus, it was extremely rare for an American to make it to a league like that more than three decades ago. It took many more years after Lalas before the likes of Oguchi Onyewu and Michael Bradley and Weston McKennie were signed by Italian teams.
When Alexi came back to the U.S., he was a Major League Soccer original, one of the early wave of American players who helped get the league off the ground. He played for New England, Kansas City, NY/NJ, and Los Angeles, more than 150 appearances highlighted by a 2002 MLS Cup win on a Galaxy team that had some pretty good players in Carlos Ruiz, Cobi Jones, Danny Califf, and Mauricio Cienfuegos. People like to shit on MLS, but the early DC and LA teams were, in fact, not bad at all considering how young and raw the league itself was.
The thing about Henry and Ibrahimovic is that 99.9% of retired soccer players did not have the career that those guys had. That’s why this particular line of criticism is disingenuous.
“Lalas doesn’t deserve to be up there with two all-time greats!”
Well guess what? Unless you can go get Zinedine Zidane, Paolo Maldini, and Brazilian Ronaldo, the third guy on the panel is going to have a weak resume compared to the other two. It would be like putting Nelson Agholor up there with Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Did Nelly have half the career as those guys? No. But that doesn’t mean he’s some nobody. He won a ring and caught almost 40 NFL touchdown passes. He played more than 150 NFL games.
The thing about Alexi is that he was marketed to us back in the 1990s because he had long red hair and a goatee and this crazy look. He played guitar and was into music and whatnot. So he became one of the faces of a burgeoning sport that wasn’t very popular at the time. Nobody ever mistook him for Franco Baresi on the field, but we as young kids were impressionable, and we had magazines with Alexi on the front, and trading cards – various pieces of classic physical media. This was long before streaming and summer cash grab friendlies between Liverpool and Chelsea. This was decades before the Philadelphia Union academy and all of that. The scene was completely differently. Everybody was playing this auxiliary role of trying to grow the game and get people interested, and Alexi was one of those guys who contributed with the national team on the field, and a willingness to market the game off of it. None of the American players from that era had careers like Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Not Eric Wynalda, not Earnie Stewart, not Claudio Reyna or Tab Ramos or John Harkes. But what they did do is lay down the foundational pieces for other American players to follow, and they occupy an important chapter in the lore of American soccer as members of the 1994 World Cup team. That’s something that older fans of the American game will always respect – their contributions to the USMNT before helping Major League Soccer get off the ground.
Regardless, the Lalas pile on will likely continue. If you don’t like the guy’s commentary or his politics, that’s totally fair. Open season. But career erasure enters pointless territory. The guy was a decent player for his day. You could replace him with 10,000 other former players who weren’t as good as Henry or Zlatan.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com