Someone Hit Alexi Lalas In The Face With A Piece Heavy Mining Equipment

Alexi Lalas is everything we don't want.

I am the last generation that can remember a time when Fox wasn't involved in sports. We were kids when the Earth shifted off its axis, seemingly, as Fox took away the NFC package from CBS. It iss hard to state how big a story this was, and how monumental it felt that the staid NFL was abandoning a long-time partner for the network-version of Peewee's Playhouse at Fox. Sometimes I long for the days when Fox wasn't involved in sports (though they were the first to implement the scorebug, which at the time also felt completely revolutionary).

As a soccer fan, I also remember when Fox provided the only outlet for our curiosity, at least one that didn't involve paying a cover at a bar. Fox Sports World, and then Fox Soccer Channel, was just about the only game in town for a few years there for any soccer on TV, aside from maybe some tape-delay stuff on ESPN 2 at 1 am. It was certainly a TV backwater, but it's where we had to go.

All that said, soccer is something that Fox has never taken seriously, despite whatever fees they pay for World Cups and Euros and various other tournaments. Sure, they want the eyeballs, they want the prestige of saying they're the channel for the World Cup. But the actual coverage of the sport, of trying to provide the best window into it and the best analysis, they've never cared.

I know this because Alexi Lalas has been part of their coverage for so long now.

Fox is more responsible for the modern style of major sports coverage, where who is covering sports and how they're doing it is just as important as actually covering the sport. ESPN felt the need to follow suit, which is how we get modern swamp beasts like Stephen A. Smith. It probably stems from that initial reshaping of sports broadcasting when they did usurp the NFL from CBS, because that was such a huge story. Ever since, Fox has treated "Fox broadcasts the NFL" as important as just the NFL.

Which means not only do they need to celebrate themselves at all times, but they need to hire personalities around these sports that will make their coverage of it a story. It can be as harmless but annoying like Terry Bradshaw narrating highlights, which at first was something new and is now a sideshow if not elder abuse. Or it can be someone like Lalas, whose only job is simply to emit. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it doesn't matter if it has anything to do with what went on on the field in front of him, it doesn't matter who it pisses off. He just has to produce anything at volume.

I cannot stress enough that the only reason Lalas is known to anyone is because of a lack of a haircut in 1994. No one knew who anyone on the World Cup team was that year, because almost all of them didn't play anywhere because they weren't good enough, and soccer was still on the level of drinking bleach to sports fans on these shores (remember when drinking bleach was drinking bleach?). They were just US national team players. So there was Lalas, instantly recognizable, and he's been cashing in on it ever since. Even though he's pretty much done nothing else.

He wasn't good. He got 40 games over two seasons for a low-level Serie A team way back when. Would that get anyone into the USMNT now? Ask Gianluca Busio about it. He then bounced around the first version of MLS for a while, and he sucked then, too.

His career as an executive was just barely on this side of a disaster. San Jose sucked with him as GM. New York sucked with him as GM. He just happened to be GM of the Galaxy when MLS decided it could open up the wallet to bring in David Beckham, and then the Galaxy sucked anyway. He's been in a Fox booth ever since, for reasons no one can identify other than he emits and some altekakers remember him from 1994.

When analyzing anything, he has no leg to stand on. At least when Carli Lloyd starts belching out whatever sludge escapes her brain and celebrating her own career, she has quite the career to celebrate. She was the best player in the world for a bit there and dominated a World Cup. Alexi Lalas once shot par on a mini-golf course, I assume.

Lalas has no business on a soccer broadcast of any kind simply due to his soccer record. I don't believe that TV analysts have to be former greats on the field or ice or court, otherwise Wayne Gretzky would actually have something to say. But they do have to be good analysts, proving that they see deep into the game they're watching. Lalas fails on both counts. He's incurious, obtuse, and arrogant about being so.

When Lalas starts interjecting his tiny-minded, abhorrent right-wing views into things, I'm sure it has Fox execs tumescent but is anathema to most soccer fans. I don't know what the Venn diagram of Trump supporters and soccer fans would look like exactly, but I bet it would have a much smaller overlap than a lot of sports. More so in women's soccer, which Fox still lets Lalas spill masticated food over.

A lot of us became soccer fans because it was outside the dumbass cultures that other sports had created here. It was worldly, and played everywhere, in various styles that were tied to that country's particular culture. I'm certainly not here to argue that soccer doesn't have huge problems with racism and classism and sexism, because it does. But in this country, those of us partly escaped a lot of the bullshit that surrounded the four major sports by becoming soccer fans.

Lalas shits all over that, by trying to be soccer's big talking head that just says things in order to get people to notice that he's saying things. It's not a big secret why one of the big reasons NBC's coverage of the Premier League has ratings that occasionally creep by the NHL's is that they treat fans like adults. They're not there to shout, they're not there to make themselves the story, they're not there to emit. They just talk about the game in front of them as they see it, and try to point out things that the casual fan, or even the dedicated one, might not see. What a concept!

Lalas is everything wrong with sports coverage, and everything we didn't want in our soccer coverage when we became fans. We don't want the shouting maws on our screens, or incomparably stupid headlines attached to halftime shows, or analysts trying to prove how manly they are. We fled here to leave that to the other sports we grew weary of watching.

I know we'll never be rid of him, bar the Monty Python foot landing on him one day. Hope springs eternal.