For years, a 28-year-old man named Moon has attended every home game of the Major League Soccer team LAFC and the National Women’s Soccer League team Angel City. He always has a flag in tow, which is not unusual at a soccer game: Fans with flags and tifos are an essential part of the atmosphere, and Moon has become a familiar sight at both teams’ games. But last week, for the first time, security at Angel City’s final regular-season game told Moon he had to take down his flag or he would be asked to leave the game. “I could feel him, the security person, get angrier. He started getting a little handsy, just kind of trying to grab the flag a little bit,” Moon told the Los Angeles Times. “It did feel like we didn’t have a choice.” So he left. Because the banner Moon was waving — the one he has been waving for years — was a Palestinian flag. After receiving complaints about it, the club had announced before the game that “only representations relating to the two teams competing in today’s match will be allowed inside.”
Moon decided to come in with his flag anyway. “I immediately stopped thinking about how this was the last opportunity we had to make the playoffs,” Moon told the Times. “My thoughts were only about what I was going to do. Am I going to live up to my morals and wave the Palestinian flag like I had with every game?”
The new policy, as you might expect, has prompted a nonstop cavalcade of fury from all directions, with many fans now saying they’ve been wanting to get rid of Moon’s flag for years and others claiming the team has taken an overtly pro-Israel posture. The latter group has focused much of its anger on Natalie Portman, the team’s co-owner and co-founder, who is Israeli American. (Portman, it should be noted, once turned down Israeli’s Genesis Prize in protest of Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies toward the Palestinian people.) To discuss Angel City soccer right now is to be dragged into an endless morass, in which half the fan base is lobbying accusations of genocide back and forth with the other half. It’s quite a turn for a franchise that, until three weeks ago, had been heralded as one of the most ethical and progressive in sports, complete with a gaggle of celebrity investors and board members (including Serena Williams, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Chastain, Billie Jean King, and Portman) and a three-part HBO series about the team’s executive team.
For decades, sports teams have attempted to avoid politics at every turn, not just because the franchises are in actuality huge corporations meant to appeal to every political persuasion — as best exemplified by Michael Jordan’s famous “Republicans buy sneakers too” quote — but because so much of sports’ appeal is foundationally rooted in the idea that all that matters is what happens on the field. In a divisive world, the theory goes, sports is the one unifying thing we have: A fan of your team is your best friend for the two hours your team is playing, regardless of what the two of you think about anything else. This is why not everyone who says “stick to sports” is inherently disingenuous.
That they have an emotional point doesn’t make them any less delusional, though. The notion that you can separate sports from the political decisions that surround them has always been ridiculous. Everything involved in sports is a political act because everything in the world is a political act. The national anthem, the location of your team’s stadium, the way that stadium was built and how it was funded, the transportation you took to the game, how the money you’re giving the team is being spent, even the personalities of the players and owners you support — these are all individual political decisions, whether fans want to admit it or not.
And until recently, spurred by the pandemic/George Floyd/Trump tumult of 2020, the world of sports had backed away from this delusion. The NBA has fought voter suppression; MLB pulled its All-Star Game out of Georgia because of its anti-voting law; the WNBA may have helped give Democrats the Senate; the NFL commissioner literally said the words “Black lives matter.” The last three years have been the most political sports has gotten since the days of Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jim Brown protesting the Vietnam War.
But there have been many, many signs that this new era of political activism is abating. LeBron James’s voter-rights organization, More Than a Vote, which had partnered with the NBA, has disbanded, and MLB has already said Georgia will be getting an All-Star Game soon — and it’s not difficult to see why. Sports is always going to want to get back to an apolitical place, and it is finding, increasingly, that making political statements, as corporations and institutions now routinely do, is causing nothing but headaches. As usual, everyone’s following the NFL, a league that was caught up in the political maelstrom constantly during the Trump era but now has almost completely backed off — and is now making more money than ever.
It is one thing, however, to no longer actively engage in political speech. It is another thing to halt it entirely. And what’s fascinating about Angel City’s no-non-sports-speech maxim is that it was anything but a lone wolf: This is now, in fact, official MLS policy.
The Athletic reported that last week, MLS quietly instituted a “temporary measure prohibiting fans attending matches from bringing signs, banners, flags, or Tifos that reference the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” The league spoke with both its clubs and its supporters’ groups, emphasizing that the policy is only temporary. But it’s difficult to understand what would cause them to end it, unless the situation in Gaza suddenly improves and the passions of everyone even tangentially connected to this conflict start magically cooling. (If MLS has a strategy for making this happen, it is very much encouraged to share it with the rest of us.) It’s not just the MLS, either. The English Premier League has recommended its clubs ban both Israeli and Palestinian flags, and many teams, including Tottenham Hotspur, have expanded the ban to “flags from nations in conflict or that could be considered inflammatory.”
You can understand why teams and leagues would want to ban the flags outside of just wanting to stay out of politics; there is a fan-safety issue involved here, with the potential for discord and even violence in the stands. (Worse than talking about politics? Having fans feel unsafe at your stadium.) But this sure feels like a policy that could set some pretty serious precedents. Even the phrase nations in conflict is maddeningly vague: If we’re going to start banning any reference to “nations in conflict,” well, we won’t have to worry about players kneeling during the national anthem before games, because we’ll have to stop playing it.
That’s the thing, though: You can’t help but wonder if this is just the start, particularly in America. Because while your meat-and-potatoes NFL fan might be able to convince himself that Gaza is too far away to have an effect on his games, well, you may have noticed that there’s a presidential election in this country next year. And it’s fair to say that a lot of the discourse will be, oh, “considered inflammatory.” A probable Biden-Trump matchup, which would take place while the former president is a defendant in several different trials while drumming up increasingly alarming levels of outrage among his supporters, is going to be the signature dominant story in American culture next year, and sports will not be unaffected. Will a league, out of fear of violence in the stands, say, ban MAGA signs inside sporting events? How do you think that will go over? (One suspects Trump might make a bit of noise about it.) You can see why, in the interests of pseudo-neutrality and fan safety, American sports teams would want to keep political signage and speech out of their stadiums next year. But is that realistic? Or even helpful?
Sports is trying, in every possible way, to pull back from politics. But the world has a way of getting inside the stadium, whether teams, players, or even fans want it to or not. This may not yet currently be a major issue in sports. But it’s about to be.
