Alexi Lalas has not made any new fans during this World Cup.
On a desk with Rebecca Lowe, Thierry Henry, and Zlatan Ibrahimović, he seems wildly out of place. Despite Lowe’s insistence to the contrary, it’s hard to believe that those three like the former USMNT center back all that much.
Count me amongst Lalas’s detractors. I haven’t liked him since 1998 when he went on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and nosold the host’s jokes.
Lalas just brings zero joy to a broadcast. As The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand wrote earlier this month, Lalas “often tries to come across as another Barkley, but he really sounds like the Skip Bayless of soccer.”
I am willing to give Lalas a little more grace than most, though. Fox has a goal in mind for him. It’s the result of the same flawed thinking so many networks and executives have been guilty of for years.
Marchand’s quote is apt because the search for “the next Charles Barkley” is never-ending. Every single agitator or “outrageous” personality on a network’s studio desk got there because a producer looked at Barkley’s success on Inside the NBA and decided their show needed one, too. It’s a disservice to Lalas and other talents who were put in that role, and, frankly, it’s insulting to Barkley himself.
His value is considerable, but it isn’t simply in his willingness to be critical. It’s not because he can turn vulgarity and/or ignorance into comedy. Barkley’s appeal isn’t what he does. It’s in who he is. Producers will always come up short if their goal is “the next Charles Barkley.”
The most common stumbling block for people marketed this way is a lack of charm. Barkley is a crank. He will talk openly about how bad the NBA is now compared to when he played or how unskilled big men are compared to his peers. If Barkley did not also have enough humility to be the butt of a joke or admit when he got something wrong, those gripes wouldn’t be funny or charming. He would just seem like a jerk.
That’s Draymond Green’s problem. Barkley is confident about his opinions, but he doesn’t insist on his expertise. Green doesn’t think anyone who disagrees with him is even qualified to speak to him. That’s not confidence or Green keeping it real. It’s just him being a dick. No one wants to watch that.
I have always thought the entire Big Noon Kickoff cast suffers from a different version of the same problem. I just don’t see much chemistry on that show. They all may like each other a lot, but that show doesn’t feel like a conversation. It feels like five people whose internal monologues are “not my turn, not my turn, not my turn, GO!”
Charles Barkley reacts to everyone on the Inside the NBA set. No one is beneath him. Ernie Johnson has his respect, not just as a broadcaster, but as someone who watches and knows basketball. His recent uncomfortable interaction with the aforementioned Green was the result of him digesting what Green was saying, not just waiting for his turn to make a TikTok-worthy statement.
Another common mistake producers make is thinking they can manufacture some of Barkley’s most memorable moments. Talking about how hard it can be to play “when a guy’s banging you” or mistakenly describing a gift he received from Kenny Smith as “a vibrator” are funny because they just happened. They naturally came out of Barkley’s mouth, and his colleagues waited for everyone to catch on before they pounced.
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The polar opposite of that is PK Subban on ESPN’s NHL coverage. His outrageousness feels manufactured. He replays Barkley’s greatest hits for Instagram likes. His clothes are picked to generate Twitter engagement. He spins around in his chair in lieu of offering any insight. It’s just a lot of unfocused “hey, look at me” energy.
The people on camera aren’t the only ones who try to shock for the sake of shocking. Remember that in 2000, Barkley was not exactly lovable. He was still the guy who said “I’m not a role model” while amassing technical fouls and throwing people through bar windows. TNT raised more than a few eyebrows when it hired him. Lucky for the network, Barkley was not only a naturally gifted talker but also willing to listen and get better behind the desk.
Fox raised some eyebrows in 2015 when it added the permanently banned Pete Rose to its Major League Baseball studio show. He generated a few fun moments, but mostly, he was forgettable. Adding him to the lineup generated headlines and thinkpieces but was largely inconsequential, and boy, did it end badly.
Charles Barkley works because TNT didn’t just put him on and let him go. The network built a culture around him. If you’re even in the orbit of Inside the NBA, you’re expected to be comfortable being the butt of the joke, but you can trust that Barkley is fine with it happening to him, too. The same is true of the way he interacts with Kenny Smith, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson. We don’t cringe when he tells Shaq that the former MVP looks like Shrek, because we know Shaq will give it right back the second Barkley trips over his words and right into an inadvertent sexual innuendo.
That ability to give as good as you get is missing from Fox’s World Cup studio show. That’s not just Lalas’s fault. His colleagues deserve some blame there.
The audience is allowed to sit at home and hate Lalas. We aren’t trying to create something with him. Henry refusing to look at him and Ibrahimović talking over him, or worse, celebrating his absence, is uncomfortable. It’s just bad TV.
Lalas has said in the past that criticism doesn’t bother him. I hope that’s true, because boy, does he get a lot of it! I do hope that he hears the criticism, though, and finds some of it useful. This is a guy who still seems to be talking to create social media moments and Fox News headlines. I find it all so goofy, but I do cut Lalas a level of slack many others will not.
It’s not hard for me to imagine that someone at Fox told Lalas they wanted soccer’s Charles Barkley and then sat back as if that request was all that was needed. So, while I’m still not a fan, I do have some sympathy for Alexi Lalas.
About Demetri Ravanos
Demetri Ravanos is a writer and broadcaster living in Raleigh, NC. He is also the host of This Team is Killing Us, a podcast about the Carolina Panthers.