Dave Portnoy Sucks Out Loud
12 hours separated his “deport the doubters” from throwing his own USA jersey in the trash. What a massive tool.
Dave Portnoy is a total douchebag.
A spectacularly rich one, because he figured out before almost anybody that douchebaggery scales. He built a media empire around his own worst self and sold it to millions of guys who wanted permission to indulge their own, and the eyeballs have been compounding for twenty years. Underneath the schtick, he is also a massive tool and a bad guy. The fact that this act made him one of the most powerful men in American media might be the purest expression of just how far the culture has fallen.
Monday gave us the whole portrait in about twelve hours, from demanding the deportation of Americans he deemed insufficiently loyal to the USMNT to throwing his own American jersey in the trash. Was he joking? I’m not sure even he knows or cares. He made a fool of himself for all to see, and that, my friends, is today’s media model in a nutshell.
The Barstool Sports founder was all over the Trump-FIFA Balogun red card drama that dominated the political and sporting press alike. His morning hot take: “If you are against this and you’re a United States citizen, deported. I want you out of the country... first bus, plane, train. See ya. Go live somewhere else. This is about winning soccer.” He told his 3.8 million followers to report any American complaining that Balogun gets to play “so we can deport them until the World Cup is over,” then spent the afternoon stamping “DEPORT!” on strangers with a few hundred followers each, a media mogul running immigration enforcement on guys named Craig.
Yes, it was a bit, but one built on the sort of jingoistic nationalism that can start as a joke, then suddenly turns ugly when viewers less fluent in ironic detachment don’t see it as a bit. Somewhere in the middle, he posted a link to a Barstool “Hate Us” soccer tee. “Never been more true,” he wrote. Of course there’s a shirt. There’s always a shirt.
The post-game version of Portnoy, after Team USA lost 4-1: “U.S. got fucking mollywopped... we were a fucking joke.” He peeled the jersey off on camera and announced it was going in the trash. The players he’d wrapped in sixteen flag emojis that morning were now “country club D tier athletes,” and “number 13 with the ponytail” got mocked by hairstyle because learning the roster would have required caring about the team he was deporting people over.
That’s the whole guy in one news cycle. And it settles the question people have wasted twenty years asking: does he mean any of it?
He doesn’t know either. Somewhere along the way the line between Dave Portnoy and the blowhard he plays dissolved, and he stopped looking for it, because finding it doesn’t pay. Sincerity and irony are just two registers of this same tool, which he plays like an instrument, hitting whatever note draws a crowd. Monday was the demo. Flag-waving loyalty enforcement at noon, trashing American players by their ponytails at midnight. As beliefs, those cancel each other out. As content, they’re the same post.
He’s worse than a true believer, who at least has the excuse of believing. Portnoy seems to hold no position he’d defend tomorrow if it stopped drawing attention. He’s built a public life where contradiction can’t touch him. Whatever he says, he means, until he says the opposite, which he’ll also mean. Ask him to reconcile the two and you’re a hater, and the hate has a shirt.
Which is the literal truth of the headline: lots of guys suck. Portnoy sucks out loud, at full volume, on every platform, every day, and the volume turned out to be the whole business. Shamelessness this complete is almost a superpower, and he’s monetized it to stunning effect, because a man who can’t be embarrassed can never be off brand.
His success is the part that indicts the rest of us, because this country’s attention market has rewarded him lavishly for making people worse in public. Portnoy got rich cultivating the angry incurious, an audience that doesn’t want information or even entertainment so much as permission: a daily authoritative voice telling them their lesser angels are the smart bet, that resentment is patriotism, that cruelty toward a stranger is just having fun. Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our nature. Portnoy built a commerce engine for the other ones.
And the bit wrecks more than his own audience. Civic life runs on the boring assumption that people mostly mean what they say, that a public statement is a thing you can be held to. He’s spent two decades dissolving that assumption for engagement, and “DEPORT!” as a punchline lands a little differently in a country where removal is a live federal program with actual buses and actual planes.
The occasion barely matters, which is sort of the point, but for the record: Trump called Infantino; FIFA sprang Balogun through a maneuver no World Cup had used in sixty years; Belgium’s objection was ruled inadmissible without explanation; and UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” Reasonable critics kept politics out of it and made the simpler point: naked cronyism and corruption were ruining the sanctity and integrity of the greatest sporting event on earth.
Portnoy didn’t just defend the fix. He bragged that a “lengthy text” from “the highest levels of power in the world” tipped him to the reversal before it was announced, which is a hell of a thing to be proud of, then demanded the deportation of citizens who found the ruling suspicious. Next month it’ll be something else. A city, a journalist, a pizza place that crossed him.
I have a rule about not feeding trolls, about not giving attention to the tools that so shamelessly crave it, and I’m aware this violates it. But here’s the thing about real fandom, the kind Portnoy rented for a news cycle and returned by midnight: it shows up the morning after a 4-1 loss. I’ve loved this team since Korea in 2002, through a quarter century of heartbreak that makes Monday look gentle, and I watched every ugly minute from my home. It hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. That’s the fee real supporters pay for the real thing.
Portnoy’s jersey is in the trash, which is fitting because it was inventory to him all along.
True fans will put theirs back in the drawer for 2030. Portnoy can fuck right off.