Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, once wrote that toxic masculinity sits at the heart of American football. He described racism, misogyny, and homophobia as the everyday language of the sport’s culture. The remarks come from a 2021 Substack post written after Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden resigned over leaked emails. They have now resurfaced as El-Sayed heads into a general election in a state that treats football as near-religion.
Abdul El-Sayed wrote in 2021 that football was filled with “toxic masculinity” and the sport was racist and homophobic. https://t.co/CB0PKqfDUh
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 10, 2026
What He Actually Wrote
El-Sayed did not hedge. “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,” he said. He claimed that in the locker room and on the sidelines, “Racism, misogyny, and homophobia were lingua franca.” He said that even though he felt free on the field as a high school player and team captain, he absorbed “a hefty dose of the worst kinds of racist taunting” off it. He accused the NFL of “deep-rooted racism” that Colin Kaepernick had supposedly exposed, dismissing the league’s later social-justice efforts as a brand exercise led by Jay-Z.
He held up the fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso as a better model: a man who cries, talks about his feelings, encourages players, bakes cookies, and smiles constantly. American football culture, in his telling, needed to be rebuilt around “positive, inclusive, and empowering values.” In related writing he also described European soccer as more egalitarian and better aligned with his politics.
The Broader Pattern
This is not an isolated complaint about bad behavior by one coach. It is a familiar progressive critique that treats traditional male competitive spaces as inherently diseased. Football demands physical courage, hierarchy, stoicism under pressure, and group loyalty. Those traits get reframed as “toxic.” The same framework has been applied to the military, policing, and other institutions that still reward toughness and results over emotional processing and inclusion rhetoric.
El-Sayed played the game. He was a starter and captain. That makes the indictment more pointed, not less. He is not an outsider who never touched a football. He is a former participant who later decided the culture that produced the sport is the problem.
Anti-American or Just Cultural Critique?
American football is one of the clearest expressions of the country’s competitive, physical, and communal character. It is the fall calendar in Michigan. High school games pack small towns. College Saturdays define the University of Michigan and Michigan State. The Lions, for all their history of futility, still command loyalty. To declare that the sport’s core is toxic masculinity, and that its locker rooms run on racism, misogyny, and homophobia, is to pathologize something millions of ordinary Americans experience as healthy, formative, and fun.
The language tracks with a larger progressive project that treats American traditions as suspect until proven otherwise. It is the same impulse that turns Thanksgiving into a contested holiday, the Founding into a crime scene, and male spaces into presumed sites of oppression. Whether El-Sayed intends it as a full-scale attack on the country or simply as academic cultural criticism, the practical effect is the same: it tells a large share of the electorate that something they love is morally contaminated.
In a purple state that still values toughness, Friday night lights, and not being lectured by coastal-style progressives, this is not a minor footnote. It is a window into how the nominee sees the culture he wants to represent. Michigan voters will decide whether that view is serious analysis or just more of the same elite disdain for the things that make the place American.