Gounder, who lives in New York City, knows Wahl would be writing, podcasting, and doing videos, with great joy, about the sterling performances from the likes of Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi, and Erling Haaland. Wahl would appreciate the packed stadiums and the cultural commingling at this World Cup: phenomena like Scotland’s Tartan Army and Japanese visitors trying Texas BBQ for the first time speak to everything Wahl loved about the planet’s most popular sport. At the same time, Wahl would have turned his critical eye toward those in power, especially after FIFA reversed a suspension earlier this week of American striker Folarin Balogun, following a phone call between FIFA president Gianni Infantino and U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Somali referee denied a visa into the U.S. The controversial treatment of the Iranian team during their World Cup stay. European officials and others crying foul over the perceived coziness between Trump and Infantino, who bestowed upon Trump an out-of-thin-air peace prize at the World Cup draw in Washington, D.C., in December: Wahl would have been all over these stories of geopolitical intrigue, while still expertly writing about the action on the pitch. Throughout his career, Wahl toed a fine journalistic line. He cheered the beauty and growth of soccer, especially in the United States, while in no way acting like a cheerleader.
This was supposed to be Wahl’s World Cup, a career capstone in the country in which his coverage, of both men’s and women’s soccer, helped fuel the growth of the sport. At Wahl’s first World Cup as a journalist, in France in 1998, soccer was such an afterthought that two other Sports Illustrated writers returned home before the final: Wahl covered the France-Brazil game, at 24, for the preeminent sports publication in the United States and took ownership of a beat that so many of his peers overlooked. Wahl embraced the upstart digital-media space, bringing an insider’s knowledge to his substantial online following, while still writing long-form soccer features that delivered depth and insight about the game’s most prominent players.
Wahl works as a reporter during halftime of the 2014 CONCACAF Women's Championship Group B match between the Jamaica Women's National Team and the Martinique Women's National Team in Kansas City, Kan., on Oct. 16, 2014, a FIFA Women's World Cup qualifying tournament. —Andy Mead—YCJ/Icon Sportswire/Corbis/Getty Images“More than anything, he saw the soccer explosion coming,” says Seth Davis, Wahl’s former Sports Illustrated colleague on the college-basketball beat, which Wahl also worked until turning to soccer full-time before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
“I wish that Grant could have written about it, so I would know what to think,” says Davis, longtime contributor to CBS Sports’ March Madness coverage and editor-in-chief of Hoops HQ, a college-basketball site. “Grant would have been the guy who I would have read his opinion, and then an hour later I would be in a sports bar, talking to my buddies, giving that opinion as if it was my own.”
“He would have been burning up the phones before the game, working his sources,” says Mark Mravic, Wahl’s longtime editor at both Sports Illustrated and the Substack, Fútbol with Grant Wahl, he had started before his passing. “He had sources in the U.S. government, in addition to those within U.S. Soccer and FIFA. He would be probably working two or three different stories at the same time, and just juggling them, and filing. He'd be working social media. At this point he'd probably be very heavily involved in video. He would have been super busy.”
Wahl would have objected, Eric says, to an Athletic hot take that followed the U.S. loss, a commentary headlined “Let’s admit it: The United States is never going to win a men’s World Cup.” “That is crap that Grant would have never stood for,” says Eric. “We absolutely will.”
He relished the editorial freedom that working for himself provided. Before the 2022 World Cup, Wahl made several reporting trips to Qatar to talk to migrant workers about their mistreatment while building stadiums and other infrastructure for the event. In Qatar, he wore a rainbow shirt to a game he was covering: same-sex relationships are criminalized in that country. “At the time, I had suggested that maybe he not do that, because Grant's big thing was never be the story yourself,” says Eric, who is gay. “But I think, at least in my conversations with Grant before he did it, he was doing it not just for me, which I appreciated, but to try to draw attention to what he felt was the hypocrisy of FIFA and specifically the Qatar World Cup committee. He wanted to know a bit about what it felt like to be a person who couldn't hide who they were. He wanted to feel some of that negative feedback. To get an idea of what people go through. I don't know too many people who were like that.” Security guards detained Wahl for some 25 minutes: they initially demanded he remove his shirt and confiscated his phone. Wahl was eventually released and covered the USA-Wales game. A FIFA rep apologized.
“They just don’t care,” read the lede of Wahl’s penultimate piece; the story detailed the crass indifference of the Qatari World Cup CEO, when asked about the death of a Filipino migrant worker, in an accident at Saudi Arabia’s training resort during the group stage. (“This is something that you want to talk about right now?” the official responded when a reporter asked about the worker’s death. “I mean, death is a natural part of life.”) To the very end, Wahl called it like he saw it.
we wanted to take as much of our pain as possible and try to put it toward some kind of positive action,” says Eric.
This summer the American Outlaws, the U.S. soccer team fan group, carried a picture of Wahl on their pregame march to the World Cup stadiums. Gounder now wonders if Wahl would have revived his attempt, from 15 years ago, to run for FIFA president. His radical-transparency platform reads especially prescient today. The Library of Congress has reached out to Gounder and is in the process of collecting Wahl’s papers. “Though his career was cut short, we want to preserve Mr. Wahl’s contributions to the intersection of writing, sports, and human rights as part of our national collections that document the full scope of American history and culture," Sherri Seau, a modern American historian at the Library of Congress, writes in an email. Wahl’s papers will be part of its collections that also include the likes of Jackie Robinson, Katharine Graham, and legendary New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.
On Monday night, however, Gounder spent a few hours breaking down in tears. “I miss him now more than ever,” she says. “And I know I'm not the only one.”
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