Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once offered a decidedly critical assessment of American football culture, arguing that “toxic masculinity” runs through the country’s most popular sport and describing racism, misogyny and homophobia as commonplace during his own experience playing football.
The comments came in a 2021 Substack post written after Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden resigned following the disclosure of emails containing racist, homophobic and misogynistic language.
For El-Sayed, Gruden’s emails represented something larger than one coach behaving badly.
“The toxic masculinity at the heart of America’s most popular sport — and men’s sports culture more generally — is way deeper than a few emails or a Jay-Z turnaround,” El-Sayed wrote.
Those words are receiving new attention because El-Sayed isn’t simply a progressive commentator anymore.
He is now the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan after narrowly winning his party’s primary last week by less than one percentage point.
El-Sayed’s criticism of football is particularly interesting because he wasn’t writing as someone who had never played the game.
He described enjoying football during his youth and finding something liberating about actually competing.
“On the football field, I felt free,” El-Sayed wrote.
The locker room was another matter.
“And yet on the sidelines and in the locker room, I was fed a hefty dose of the worst kinds of racist taunting,” he continued.
El-Sayed summarized the environment he personally encountered in stark terms.
“Racism, misogyny, and homophobia were lingua franca,” he wrote.
That was his description of his experience, rather than evidence that every football program or locker room operates that way. But El-Sayed expanded his argument beyond his own team by criticizing the broader “bro” culture he associated with men’s athletics.
His preferred alternative came from an unusual source for a serious discussion about sports culture: “Ted Lasso.”
The Apple TV+ series centers on an American football coach who finds himself managing an English soccer team. El-Sayed pointed to the fictional coach’s emotional openness as an example of the sort of masculinity he wanted athletics to encourage.
“Ted cries. He talks through his problems. He encourages his players. He bakes biscuits (er, cookies) for his boss. He smiles … like, all the time,” El-Sayed wrote.
He argued that sports should instead cultivate “positive, inclusive, and empowering values.”
“Sport is a metaphor for life,” he added. “For millions of young people, sports can teach life’s lessons in a safe and nurturing environment.”
In 2021, that was an essay about athletics, masculinity and culture.
In 2026, El-Sayed is asking Michigan voters to send him to the United States Senate, which means his older writings are inevitably going to be examined through a political lens.
And he enters the general election after an extremely close Democratic primary.
El-Sayed prevailed against the Democratic establishment by a razor-thin margin, relying heavily on support from younger and more highly educated voters. NBC News’ analysis of county-level results found that those constituencies helped push him across the finish line while simultaneously revealing areas where he will need to broaden his appeal for November.
His associations on the political left are also likely to receive attention. El-Sayed has courted audiences that include followers of left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, giving Republicans another line of attack as they attempt to portray him as outside Michigan’s political mainstream.
Whether a five-year-old essay about football moves many votes is another question entirely.
Candidates accumulate years of speeches, interviews and writing before running for major office, and opponents routinely search that record for material capable of defining them before they can define themselves.
El-Sayed has made that process relatively easy because his 2021 argument wasn’t subtle.
He didn’t merely condemn Jon Gruden’s emails. He explicitly identified what he considered “toxic masculinity” at the heart of football and men’s sports culture, drawing partly on the racism and hostility he says he personally experienced as a young player.
Now those words belong to a Senate nominee rather than a Substack writer.
