The French aristocrat and the all-American idiot: Henry v Lalas is the World Cup’s most compelling battle

Thierry Henry and Alexi Lalas are at the forefront of Fox’s coverage, alongside Rebecca Lowe and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Photograph: Frank Micelotta/Fox Sports/Getty Images

We all know someone like Alexi Lalas. He’s the ranter whose rants never actually say anything, the life of the party at the party no one enjoys attending, the “big personality” who’s always misjudging the size of the room. He’s corporate America’s idea of a fun guy, the type of workplace “character” whose business trip hangover never stops him from being first at the hotel breakfast buffet, hair wet, Untuckit shirt untucked. He would absolutely dominate karaoke night at a conference on infrastructure finance. If only this were the limit of Alexi Lalas’s actual impact on the world, our culture would live in blessed ignorance of his existence. But in the real world Alexi Lalas is not a small-time menace working the floor at an infrastructure conference. In the real world Alexi Lalas is American soccer’s brightest media star, and he is everywhere this World Cup.

When Lalas’s Roger Ramjet jaw thrust into frame on Fox Sports at the start of this tournament, it’s fair to assume that many viewers felt a sense of dread similar to that expressed in the Grand Theft Auto meme: “Ah shit, here we go again.” Lalas’s ubiquitousness every World Cup is American TV’s answer to the Iran War: no one wants it, everyone hates it, and as it drags on, it inevitably becomes a face-saving exercise in damage limitation. But there was also a glimmer of hope: for this tournament Fox has enlisted a pair of elite European strikers, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, to terrorize Lalas and shake proceedings up. Steered by Rebecca Lowe, this new-look panel has promised a slightly more sophisticated approach to covering the tournament than the yahooing belligerence that has been Fox’s stock-in-trade at the last two World Cups.

Zlatan is a dud, the late-career Samir Nasri of pundits – all minimal effort and visible exhaustion. But Henry is magnificent, which is no real surprise for those of us who follow his work through the Champions League season on CBS. And he has already begun to work his blood-twisting magic on the Maga hack at the far-right end of the panel. Brazil-Morocco, Netherlands-Japan, and France-Senegal have all had their admirers, but for sheer drama and eviscerating beauty they have not come close to matching Fox’s on-set title fight. The French aristocrat vs the all-American idiot: Henry-Lalas is the real battle of this World Cup.

Henry’s now-viral humiliation of Lalas in the studio kickaround segment the other day – passing the ball with one foot then dragging it away with the other, leaving the defender with 96 caps for the US men’s national team to dance with thin air –was absolutely filthy, and in the arena of on-set debate the action has been no less processional. This has been less a battle than a slow-motion scalping, and the good news is it still has weeks left to run.

In contrast to the gormless agreeability and exhausting talkiness that reign on American TV, Henry is a wonderfully unimpressed on-screen presence, all raised eyebrows, frozen double takes, lip quivers, and ashen shrugs. But he’s more than just an assembly of rehearsed gestures; he also has a lively mind and a sharp sense of humor. Whenever Titi’s sleek dome pops up on screen, you instantly know what you’re going to get: astute in-game observations, learned references to tactical history, and a memorable facial expression or two. Lalas, to use a bit of managerial jargon for players of less refined talents, “offers something different”. Grating contrarianism, relentless jingoism, and a boorish insistence on America as the sport’s future constitute the core of his offering.

Lalas enjoyed a solid playing career, but he’s obviously not in the same league as Henry, widely considered the greatest footballer in Premier League history. This vast gulf in on-field pedigree has become more awkward as the tournament has progressed, with Lalas retreating into a meek silence whenever Henry reveals his depth of footballing experience. In a conversation where his co-panelist is casually reminiscing about his days playing alongside Messi or exchanging shirts with Ronaldo Nazário at the World Cup, what exactly is Lalas going to talk about – coming on as a second-half substitute for Earnie Stewart in a friendly against Scotland in 1998? Helping the Kansas City Wizards finish last in the 1999 MLS Western Conference? Did Lalas enjoy an elite playing career? No. But does he do the background reading that might compensate for his relative lack of standing in a conversation with titans like Henry and Zlatan? Also no. But is he charming or funny or charismatic or otherwise magnetic on screen? Eh, no.

If Clint Dempsey represents soccer’s version of the American dream – growing up in a trailer park and overcoming poverty, hardship, and family tragedy to become arguably the USMNT’s greatest ever player – Lalas may be the American nightmare: the man who soared into the national consciousness in 1994 in a blaze of kick-ups and flaming hair has ended up an international joke. Once, he sang crunchy dad rock and charmed the Olsen twins; now, he’s on Twitter defending ads during the hydration breaks and quote-tweeting accounts with 197 followers to let us all know how “proud” he is to call the sport soccer, not football (for the last time: WHO CARES?).

Contrast this with Henry. The Frenchman’s voice – the hooting vowels, the fleshy emphases, the rounded Rs delivered out the side of the mouth – adds a dusting of Euro flair to everything he says. Among Henry’s many gifts as a broadcaster is an awareness that it is not always necessary to speak loudly to make an impression. Lalas never says anything of substance but when he does open his mouth the emerging inanity is always delivered at full volume: “IT’S GO TIME!” Maybe there was once a time when Lalas offered American soccer a kindler, gentler, more reflective face. But that time is long past. While Lalas rants and states the obvious (“We need Christian Pulisic to step up!”), Henry is a model of cosmopolitan calm – and it’s in this contrast of approaches, rather than any direct confrontation, that the meat of their battle resides.

Often over the course of the tournament’s opening days it has felt as if Lalas’s fellow panelists are laboring under a contractual obligation to find him interesting, a burden felt in every strained nod in agreement and forced round of laughter at a signature “bit”. The tirades, the improvised bars, the crescendoes to nothing: Lalas has given us the full package so far this tournament, and his studio mates have dutifully done their best to appear to find the man fun and insightful.

In the half-time recap of France v Senegal, Lalas described the French as “lacksadaiscal” (an autological mangling that, in Lalas’s own lazy attempt to pronounce the word “lackadaisical”, unintentionally expressed the very property described), drawing particular attention to the defending on a golden chance for Senegal that Ismaïla Sarr sprayed over the crossbar. “Sarr! Over the bar! Hit it far!” Lalas exclaimed, a trademark rhyme that elicited polite smiles from Lowe and Ibrahimovic. Henry, meanwhile, laughed and shook his head in mock wonder, repeating the words “Sarr over the bar” in the manner of a fond parent congratulating his five-year-old on successfully rhyming “cat” with “mat”. The beauty of Henry’s performance in this epic TV mismatch is that his cloak of Gallic outrecuidance has lent the contempt in which he plainly holds Lalas a measure of deniability. Is Henry mean, or just French?

At points Ibrahimovic has made it clear that he shares this disdain for the unquiet American, but he can’t touch Henry’s variety and subtlety when it comes to showing Lalas up. The French legend is not afraid to learn new things and study up on countries and players he’s not familiar with; Lalas gives the impression that he does not need to do any work for the simple reason that he’s American, and America, baby, is No 1. Titi’s contributions in the lead-up to USA v Australia on Friday included an incisive defense of counterattacking football, and a surprisingly deep dissection of the abilities of Socceroos midfielders Connor Metcalfe and Paul Okon-Engstler, two players it’s fair to assume that few in Australia – let alone America – had heard of until a few weeks ago.

Over in Seattle, meanwhile, with a crush of American fans at his back, Lalas called Socceroos defender Alessandro Circati “Cicada”. With that out of the way, he returned to regular programming: “America wants to celebrate America and this team is giving America a reason to celebrate America, and man oh man Rob Stone, ain’t that America?”

The kind of trollish, hyperventilating garbage that Lalas specializes in is standard fare on sports cable, but it’s a weird fit for soccer, whose global reach compels a kind of analytical modesty. It also runs counter to the sport’s prevailing cultural politics. Soccer in the US is the domain of migrants, urban liberals, and anyone too scrawny for the bigger homegrown sports. There’s a strange mismatch between soccer as it actually exists throughout the United States and the red-meat Americana of Fox’s World Cup coverage, and no one better embodies this incongruence than the network’s resident carrot. While USMNT players expound thoughtfully on the importance of Juneteenth, vocal Trump supporter Lalas is busy doing promo videos for the Department of Homeland Security. (No doubt he would have loved the DHS’s hilarious tweet claiming the US’s heroic defensive effort in the second half against Australia as a variety of Trumpian xenophobia.) For Fox to turn a man as partisan, bullying, and unlikeable as Lalas into American soccer’s figurehead is the media equivalent of getting John Wayne Gacy to perform at a children’s birthday party.

But now – improbably and perhaps accidentally – Fox has offered US viewers a living example of how much better they could have it, of what the beautiful game might look like on TV with the Lalasian headlights dimmed.

If the culture of American soccer – including on TV – moves in the same positive direction as matters on the pitch, the sport should eventually outgrow Lalas. In years to come, his brand of on-screen thuggery may even be remembered as the relic of a less enlightened era, as a kind of footballing minstrelsy. Maybe the retrospective embarrassment associated with Lexi the loinmaster will be so strong that he’ll be disappeared from the archival footage of this tournament altogether, like a purged party official in Stalinist Russia, and the scenes he once hogged will just show 30 seconds of mystifying silence with Carli Lloyd saying “right on” at the end. We can dream.

In the meantime we have this: the vindicating spectacle of a footballing lord showing up on set every day through this World Cup and coolly nutmegging Fox’s house clown into oblivion. In many ways, this is better.