World Cup banter battle is leaving everything on the pitch

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Alexi Lalas looked very pleased with himself. For most of the first couple of weeks of the World Cup, the most prominent member of America’s football commentariat has been the butt of the joke. It is not a role to which he is accustomed: Lalas, the former United States defender, takes a bombastic, front-foot approach to punditry. He is normally the alpha.

This time around, though, he has been relegated to a sidekick role in the studio panel assembled by Fox, the network that holds the broadcast rights in the United States, to anchor its coverage. He has been joined, at no little cost, by Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, both of whom – on balance – boast just a touch more playing pedigree than he does.

Over the course of the first couple of weeks, a particular dynamic has developed behind the desk. Or, at least, viewers have decided that it has; the supporting evidence is a little more scant than anyone really wants to admit. Regardless, it is now an established fact that Henry and Ibrahimovic have scorned Lalas as both a blowhard and an irrelevance. 

This has taken hold because it plays to several pre-conceived stereotypes: Henry and Ibrahimovic as European sophisticates and Lalas as the American bumpkin. This works because Lalas is outspoken politically in a way that puts him at odds with much of America’s traditional football-watching public: he is maybe best thought of as a sort of NRA (National Rifle Association) Jason Cundy.

The question of whether he can ever win their approval has become something of a staple of World Cup coverage; clips of the two of them scarcely containing their disdain have gone consistently viral. When Rebecca Lowe, the show’s amiable if slightly baffled host, pointed out over the weekend that Lalas was not present, Ibrahimovic deadpanned: “You’re welcome, America.”

And then, on Sunday, Lalas not only returned but scored a point. Ibrahimovic had decided to broadcast wearing an all-white suit with a black tie, as though Colonel Sanders was appearing in court. In response to yet more ribbing, Lalas struck back. “You look like you should be welcoming people to Fantasy Island,” he said. Ibrahimovic could not help himself. He cracked a smile. “I made him laugh,” Lalas cackled, with what by this stage should be regarded as well-deserved glee.

We’ll return to the specific subject of Lalas at greater length later in the tournament, but there is a broader – and perhaps more pernicious trend – that all of this illustrates. Fox has paid a huge amount of money for this tournament. Broadcasters around the world are spending vast sums to cover it. And yet they all, as one, seem to have decided that it should be analysed exclusively through the prism of what we are going to have to call banter.

We can pretty plainly blame another American network, CBS, for this development. Their Champions League show – the one featuring Henry, Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards, who is ordinarily dressed up as a baby or Santa or something – has become a reliable generator of colossal numbers of shares and likes on social media. Now everyone else has decided they want a bite of the same cherry.

This, fundamentally, is the problem with a media driven by numbers. In the same way as the act of observing a thing changes its nature, so there is a tendency to assume that the aspect of something that can be measured must be the most important part. 

And so choosing to mimic the banter of the CBS show ignores the fact that it is not just a clip-generating machine; the trio also do pretty good analysis of the games they are covering. That’s just not the stuff that gets shared, partly because of rights issues and partly because analysis of football matches is not especially noteworthy, not in the way that Carragher broadcasting while being fired out of a cannon might be.

There is also no way of telling whether people are sharing the clips because they like them or because they hate them. That does not matter in an industry in which the only measure is engagement. It becomes more important when you remember that you’re supposed to be engaging an audience in an event.

Lalas has, by and large, been blamed for the descent of Fox’s coverage, but to be perfectly honest the other two are complicit. Ibrahimovic seems to have nothing but his schtick. Henry is a keen-eyed observer of football, a smart and engaging man, but he has clearly worked out that it is much easier to make his money by doing Gallic-infused Tim-from-The-Office cutaways.

And besides, this is what Fox seems to have asked of them, just as it seems to be what Goalhanger decided they have been paid a seven-figure sum to provide Netflix: the first few minutes of their first show were devoted to Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker mocking the shirt that Richards had chosen for the occasion.

This is not designed to be good television. It is designed to be shared on social media because it is funny. Nobody seems to have thought that literally none of the people involved are comedians, and so none of it reliably meets that bar. It has the contours and cadence of comedy, but it is not comedy. It is banter, and the numbers have declared it is what we want, whether that is true or not.

Photograph by Frank Micelotta/Fox Sports via Getty Images