Lalas, predictably, has been at the heart of Fox’s slickest on-screen moves this summer, and despite a slow start – in which it appeared he’d been deployed as a clown, a pure American idiot to entertain the Europeans on set – he’s grown into the summer impressively. Ponying up in a pastel suite of summer suits from Men’s Wearhouse, his thinning orange locks swept into a Trumpy scroll, the Big A has commanded the desk from his far-right perch with customary charmlessness and belligerence. In a tournament filled with “creative moments of the half, sponsored by IBM”, Lalas often appears to be sponsored by IBS, launching into his uncontrollable verbal tirades (“HOLY SCHICK!”, “THIS IS THE NEW ROMANTIC WAY TO PLAY MY FRIEND!”, “VAR SAYS NEIN!”) with the projectile force of a bout of diarrhea. As Lalas has asserted himself over his on-air colleagues, Fox’s panels have suffered, with Daniel Sturridge (a richly unhinged talent Fox should be getting way more out of) reduced to shouting inanities like “They have to get as much points as possible!” and Schmeichel trudging through his lines like a disappointed dad while Lex sits poised at the end of the panel ready to land his zingers and power rankings (God, so many power rankings) and the dead air of Fox’s auto-generated Teutonic set threatens to suck everyone into the currents of the fake Rhine pictured behind them. Lalas is a man who would power rank his own farts, if given the opportunity – and the way things are going on Fox, he probably will come 2026. There can be no real improvement in the coverage of soccer in this country as long as this man continues to have a job.
On the other hand, the beauty of Fox’s soccer team is that it has so many different routes to an own goal. If the theme of the footballing summer is that players you maybe thought were past their prime are still among the elite – Pepe, Xherdan Shaqiri, N’Golo Kanté, Alexis Sánchez – Fox’s coverage has seemed determined to show that all the pundits you hated last time round are as bad as ever. Hockey maestro JP Dellacamera hasn’t quite hit the heights of last year’s Women’s World Cup, when he called the Ballon d’Or the “Ballon Dior”, but he’s sprinkled his match commentary with just enough shrieks of “Denied!”, “Ball in!” and “Shot!” to never release us from the ambient sense that we’re actually watching a low-stakes US college athletics meet. Stu Holden has squeaked through his shifts in commentary and on the panel in a series of increasingly loud suits, a perpetual intern. Warren Barton continues his one-man mission to do away with all the fancy continental nonsense of passing and triangles and playing out from the back and return the game to its roots in hard work, grit, getting stuck in, and “putting the ball in an area”. (After the round of 16 clash between Romania and the Netherlands, Barton noted of Denzel Dumfries: “Time and time again he went forward, putting balls into the area”. OK man we get it, you love crosses.)
Rob Stone missed a big chunk of the action in Qatar after losing his voice, but he’s bounced back to form in LA, earnestly adopting Fifa’s idiotic geographical branding by placing MetLife Stadium in “the New York, New Jersey area”, cementing his credentials as a company man by claiming the USMNT,
following its abysmal Copa exit, “needs to go big” with its next managerial appointment “like Fox Sports did when they hired Tom Brady”, and describing Cristiano Ronaldo as “the man in the hat”, simply because at that point in time, pictured on screen, Ronaldo happened to be wearing a hat.
And then, of course, there’s Donovan – Fox’s star man in the gantry, a lawn mower made flesh and blood. After Nico Williams missed an easy header in front of goal early in Spain’s group match against Italy, Donovan flatly intoned, “What a chance this is for Nico Williams, he’s going to have nightmares about this Ian” – and you could tell that the nightmare had already begun with Donovan’s delivery, the syllables unvarying in pitch and volume, the drama of on-field events communicated with all the emotional intensity of a dot matrix printer. But Donovan has range, and this is what makes him so magnetic as a media performer. At one point during Serbia v England Ian Darke asked him a question and Donovan simply … didn’t respond. The great commentators have the gift of letting the action speak for itself; Donovan has the gift of just not speaking. It’s a rare talent that can take all the excitement of international football and drain it of any semblance of life, but this is the unique gift that keeps the Fox suits coming back to the Donovanian well, year after year. The Covid pandemic will be nothing next to the mass extinction event likely once this man is set loose on a World Cup on home soil.
Mangled pronunciations have decorated Fox’s coverage of these two tournaments, establishing the network’s bona fides as a center of American exceptionalism untroubled by foreign linguistic norms. Lalas has chomped out Didier Deschamps as “Deh-shomps” and parped Christoph Baumgartner as “Bum gardener”; Aurélien Tchouaméni has emerged, from various lips, as “Chew-many”, “Shao-mayny”, “Chewa-mayny”, and “Chow-mania”; Dellacamara mixed James Rodríguez with tahini, garlic, olive oil and chickpeas to produce “Hummus Rodríguez”. For the Romanian team – with its bewildering battery of Mans, Marins, Burcǎs, Bancus, Stancius, Drăgușes and Drăgușins – the Fox commentators have done whatever they want, sidestepping the messy business of matching the sounds in their mouths to the letters on the page altogether and randomly calling players “Borker”, “Marine” or “Goose” as necessary. Country-level name changes have proved even more confounding. Czechia has become “Checkyaaaa”. Türkiye? Turkey yay!