Sports media gatekeepers try to dictate which American fans are allowed to cheer for Team USA at World Cup

The World Cup is here, the United States men's national team has already won its group, and American fans finally have a chance to rally around a team wearing red, white and blue on home soil.

So, of course, the liberal media had to make it weird.

Could this just be a cool moment for American soccer? Apparently not.

Instead, some of the usual suspects in sports media have decided the World Cup is another opportunity to push every preferred narrative: race, identity politics, Trump, MAGA, immigration, American shame, and the idea that there is a right kind of American fan and a wrong kind of American fan.

The Guardian gave probably the best example in a Sunday piece about Fox's World Cup coverage and Alexi Lalas, framing Thierry Henry vs. Lalas as "the World Cup's most compelling battle."

The headline called Henry a "French aristocrat" and Lalas an "all-American idiot."

Subtle, huh?

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The piece referred to Lalas as a "MAGA hack" and positioned him as the embarrassing, loud, patriotic American ruining the world's game for everyone else. It also claimed soccer in America belongs to "migrants, urban liberals" and people "too scrawny" for other American sports. Additionally, the column compared Lalas to serial killer John Wayne Gacy. There's truly no line these people won't cross when attempting to tear down their "enemies.

But buried in all the ad hominem attacks lobbed at Lalas was the broader point the author wanted to make: Soccer belongs to them.

Not to you.

Not to the guy in a red hat. Not to the Fox viewer. Not to the American fan who calls it soccer, waves the flag and doesn't apologize for loving his country.

The Guardian doesn't just dislike Lalas' style. It goes to extreme lengths to show that Lalas represents a kind of American soccer fan the left can't stand: unapologetically American.

That can't be allowed.

For years, soccer in America has had a strange gatekeeping problem. A certain class of fans and media members wanted the sport to become more popular, but only if the right people liked it in the right way. They wanted growth, but not too much normal American enthusiasm. They wanted packed stadiums, but not too many "USA!" chants. They wanted mainstream relevance, but not Fox, Lalas, Trump voters or anyone who might prefer tailgating to a 4,000-word essay on global football culture.

Now the World Cup is here, and the USMNT is giving the entire country a reason to care with its performance on the field. Sorry, gatekeepers, I mean "pitch."

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That should be the entire story.

But the liberal media can't help itself.

The Athletic elected to push the racial narrative in a social media post.

"Half of the U.S. men's national team is Black," the outlet wrote on X. "After decades of overwhelmingly White teams, the makeup of this team is powerful."

The media's immediate instinct was to turn the United States men's national team into a racial talking point. The team isn't just made up of Americans. Each player has to be further divided into categories based on immutable characteristics like race.

Translation: this is the acceptable America. This is the America the liberal media wants to celebrate. The U.S. men's hockey team that won gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics wasn't a liberal media darling like this USMNT group. They dared to party with FBI Director Kash Patel after winning gold and took a call from President Donald Trump. The audacity!

The Athletic, which is owned by the New York Times, also published a Jerry Brewer column before the tournament even started. "Welcome to America, the problematic host of the World Cup" was the headline. Subtle, huh?

Brewer argued that the tournament had arrived in a country fighting over "who belongs here." Brewer and his colleagues at The Athletic believe "good America" is the one that agrees with their worldview. The "bad America" is the one that voted for Donald Trump, supports law enforcement and doesn't feel the need to apologize for chanting "USA!"

The Athletic wasn't alone. USA Today ran a pre-tournament column with the headline, "United States has already lost World Cup with its greed and hostility."

I'll give the liberals credit, they're finally saying the quiet part out loud. They simply hate the United States. Or, at least, most everything it stands for.

When the liberal media likes the American story, it's diverse, organic, immigrant-driven and culturally sophisticated.

When the media doesn't like the American story, it's jingoistic, MAGA, and embarrassing.

Need more examples? Glad you asked, because there is no shortage of them.

The Atlantic ran a piece headlined, "The Feel-Good Story of the World Cup Is Too Good to Be True," about foreign fans going viral for loving American things like Taco Bell, Waffle House, Buc-ee's, ranch dressing and Texas Roadhouse.

Americans saw the videos and posts and most had the appropriate reaction: this is awesome.

Foreigners are visiting the United States, having fun, finding joy in the ridiculousness of American abundance and telling the internet about it. It's funny, harmless and, yes, a little patriotic.

Naturally, The Atlantic had to step in and explain that the whole thing might be less authentic than people think.

Because God forbid the world see all the greatness that the United States has to offer or Americans get a reminder of how lucky they are to live in the greatest nation in the world.

This is where the modern media brain breaks. They can't simply process American joy as American joy. There has to be a reason to make sure nobody starts feeling too good about the country.

Conservatives are often accused of being divisive, hateful and exclusionary. But when the United States is playing, conservatives generally do something very simple: they root for the United States.

They don't need every athlete to agree with them politically. They don't need every player to vote Republican. They don't need Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie, Folarin Balogun, Tim Weah, Chris Richards or anyone else to pass an ideological purity test.

They're Americans. They're wearing the colors and the crest. They're standing for the anthem. That's more than enough.

The same was true at the Olympics.

There were plenty of American athletes in Milano Cortina who made political comments that conservatives didn't like. Some criticized the country. Some criticized the Trump administration. Some seemed to suggest they represented only the version of America that aligned with their moral values.

And yet, most conservatives still rooted for Team USA.

Why?

Because they were Team USA.

Then the U.S. men's hockey team beat Canada for Olympic gold, accepted a locker-room call from President Donald Trump and celebrated with FBI Director Kash Patel, and the left-wing media had a meltdown.

Megan Rapinoe complained that the team had allowed itself to be "co-opted." Tage Thompson caught heat for wearing a MAGA hat at the White House, then responded about as reasonably as possible, saying he's proud to be an American and that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.

That should have ended the "controversy."

It didn't, because the "controversy" was never really about hockey.

It was about who is allowed to represent America.

When an American athlete criticizes the country from the left, the media calls it brave, nuanced and thoughtful. When an American athlete celebrates with a Republican president after winning a gold medal, suddenly the media says politics don't belong in sports.

Convenient, right?

The same thing is happening with the World Cup.

The USMNT is not just a team to these people. It's another battlefield in the culture war. The liberal sports media wants the team to represent a very specific America: diverse, urban, progressive, anti-MAGA, globally approved and properly embarrassed by certain forms of patriotism.

But that's not how national teams work.

The USMNT represents the United States.

All of it.

It represents Black Americans, White Americans, Latino Americans, immigrant families, rural fans, urban fans, liberals, conservatives, independents, soccer obsessives, casual World Cup fans, people who call it football, people who call it soccer and people who still don't fully understand all the rules but know they want the U.S. to win.

That's the beauty of international competition.

It strips away the nonsense, or at least it's supposed to. For 90 minutes, the entire country should come together to root for the team that represents us all.

But the liberal media keeps trying to turn something simple into something complicated.

They want to root for America, but only their America. They want to celebrate the USMNT, but only through the approved identity-politics lens. They want to enjoy the World Cup, but only after reminding everyone that Trump exists, MAGA voters exist, ICE exists, Fox News exists and some Americans have the nerve to chant for their own country without shame.

What a miserable way to watch sports. And, honestly, what a miserable way to go through life.

The World Cup should be a celebration. It should be loud, emotional, patriotic and fun. It should include flags, face paint, chants, irrational hope and millions of Americans pretending for a month that they understand the importance of a 4-2-3-1 formation.

That's sports.

That's America.

But the media can't just let it breathe. It has to sort people into groups. It has to decide which fans are authentic and which fans are embarrassing. It has to declare which version of America is worth cheering for and which version should be hidden.

Here's the problem: the country doesn't belong to them.

Neither does soccer or the USMNT.

The team wearing red, white and blue belongs to every American who wants to cheer for it. Even the ones they don't like.

If that bothers The Guardian, The Athletic, The Atlantic, USA Today, the New York Times or any other outlet trying to turn the World Cup into another identity-politics lecture, maybe they're the ones with the problem.

The rest of us just want to root for our national team and be proud of our country.