Front Towards Enemy – How America Conscripted Its Sports

“FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY”, a marking found on the M18AI Claymore, a Vietnam era mine, reads the shirt of team USA star catcher Cal Raleigh. Robert O’Neil, the Seal Team leader who claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden, was called in to give a motivational speech. This was the United States at the 2026 World Baseball Classic – a sporting event recast as a military operation. Team USA was now exporting the same hard power at the WBC that had led to the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro the previous month. So much for hard power, Venezuela beat the USA in the final 3-2.

Sports patriotism is not a post 9/11 concept. The Star-Spangled Banner has been sung at sports games since 1862 – before it was even the country's national anthem. What now occurs however, is an orchestrated display of patriotism. The ‘sacred tradition’ Trump later invoked, NFL players standing on the field for the national anthem, only became mandatory in 2009. The parades of service members, the military appreciation night that now dominates America's pastimes is not a natural culmination of the public grief in 2001. This has been deliberate paid patriotism: the Pentagon signed 72 contracts with professional sports teams between 2012 and 2015, subjecting the fans to a campaign of corporate-military national reverence. 

The apparatus of sports militarism has been fiercely policed. One only has to look at the reaction to when quarterback Colin Kaepernick first took the knee during the national anthem protesting systemic racism and police violence in 2016. Such was the widespread nature of military support in the NFL that playing the national anthem at all games was deemed apolitical. Trump, the commander-in-chief who had five draft deferments due to bone spurs, called for Kaepernick’s apparent unpatriotic behaviour to lead to the sack. The league's response, an unsuccessful attempt to institutionalise the support for the flag and military by trying to fine players who dared to kneel or sit during the anthem.

Kaepernick’s punishment was informal – enforced by the media and a president gagging for a new culture war. The vocabulary that makes this enforcement feel natural runs much deeper than one protest. American politics and sports have often found themselves using the same vocabulary: wars “kick-off”, generals throw “hail-mary’s” — “bombs” are hit by batters, and “blitzes” attempted during defence. This intersection does more than make the business of war understandable, it shapes public opinion by making actions accessible through the lens of leisure and competition. Richard Nixon, who White House officials code named quarterback, referred to a Vietnam War bombing campaign as Operation Linebacker. War’s consequences were trivialised, its costs packaged as competition to feed the same partisan excitement as a last-minute playoff winner. While this vocabulary once served as a metaphor, by 2026 the White House had dispensed with the middleman. 

For several days in March, Trump’s White House posted several videos splicing together footage of strikes in Iran with clips from American sport. One video, named ‘Touchdown’, intertwined bombing strikes with highlights of NFL and college football players, set to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. Former NFL player Ed Reed, whose footage appeared next to the video, said he did not consent or approve of this usage. Obviously. Mason Foster, who was also featured, said he was at a loss for words; nothing in the world today, he said, was as simple as a great football play or a hit. He was correct, but the White House did not care. A subsequent Pentagon investigation later found that one of the strikes shown in the videos hit an Iranian girls’ school killing 168 children. No song was set to that.

America is now hosting the biggest sporting event in the world, the World Cup. While the US men's national team itself has far less open militarism, the star-spangled banner is still etched into the fabric of the tournament at the US games. Helicopters chopped overhead during the pre-game ceremony and pyrotechnics were blasted during the national anthem showing the world the fusion between the armed forces and sports that Americans are accustomed to at baseball and American football games.

For decades, this was used for a domestic audience, now it's broadcast to a global one. Billions of people have no memory of 9/11, no familiarity with the paid patriotism or “Touchdown” are encountering this fusion for the first time. Nobody is asking them whether they consent either.

Image: Flickr/Pennsylvania National Guard (U.S. Army National Guard photo by 1st Lt. Kate McNelis)

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