It’s the Summer of Sports and Politics

Rep. Brendan Boyle is a congressman from Pennsylvania, representing a district that hugs the Delaware River in Philadelphia, including the entire northeast part of the city. Naturally, his personal X feed reflects this, but not because it’s full of updates on how federal policy might affect I-95 construction or the price of Cheez Whiz.

His personal X feed reflects this because it’s overflowing with hot sports takes.

In the past month alone, the Democrat has posted about the Jaylen Brown trade, NCAA eligibility, the Brendan Sorsby gambling controversy and Notre Dame’s conference affiliation (he’s a grad). He posted that he’ll do everything he can to bring the World Cup back to the U.S. He then took a brave plunge and posted about Caitlin Clark, which led to a quick social media scrap with columnist Jemele Hill that ended with Boyle saying the “WNBA detests Clark,” the superstar who’s broken the collective sports brain.

Boyle is a self-described “diehard Philly sports fan.” He has many digital receipts to prove it. But he also represents an area of diehards, the kind of people who climb up light poles when their teams win a championship. In a vacuum of any real monoculture, sports are as good a bet as any for connection, the sort of thing that can make European soccer fans embrace ranch dressing and unite millions over hating a 7-foot-4 man from France. It helps explain why so many politicians are keyed on soccer, football, basketball, college sports and a certain UFC fight this summer. And it’s not just fun and games, either, because the collision of sports and politics is extending well beyond X takes and silly bets.

“This is a moment of sports being explicitly political,” said Amy Bass, a Manhattanville University professor who focuses on sports, politics and culture. “This has always been one of America’s primary battlegrounds for equity, for inclusion, for civil rights. And now it’s increasingly becoming a battleground for actual public federal policy, too.”

The day before I talked to Bass last week, the Supreme Court upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho that ban transgender athletes from women’s sports, which would permit other states to do the same (but will not require states that do allow transgender athletes to participate to reverse their policies). That same morning, in a much quieter development on Capitol Hill, the House Ways and Means Committee held a discussion hearing that focused on whether the U.S. tax code is keeping up with changes in the billion-dollar sports industry.

And this is all while the Senate keeps considering a sweeping college sports bill. The Protect College Sports Act advanced past the Commerce Committee in mid-June, which is further than any college sports bill has gone in recent years. The next step would be a full Senate vote if Majority Leader John Thune wants to take it up.

Former Alabama Coach Nick Saban testifies before a Senate Committee hearing in June. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

Here, then, are the two tracks of how sports and politics are mixing: When Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) posts about Caitlin Clark, nothing happens aside from us learning how Grassley might sound as a sports radio caller. But when the Supreme Court and Congress get involved, actual lives are affected. Entire micro economies, like the name, image and likeness (NIL) market for college athletes, hang in the balance. The act of scoring political points through sport becomes a lot more consequential.

After last week’s discussion hearing on sports and taxes, the House Ways and Means Committee is taking a hard look at the tax subsidies that have lured pro teams from one state to another, according to multiple Senate aides. Whether that will lead to a draft of a bill is unclear, though Rep. Jason Smith (R-Missouri), the committee’s chair, is particularly interested in the issue after the Chiefs announced an eventual move from Missouri to Kansas. During the hearing, the Bears came up a lot, too, given that they’re threatening to leave Chicago for Hammond, Indiana.

The Senate is currently well ahead of the House on sports legislation, yet that doesn’t mean a bill is a sure thing. The Protect College Sports Act is the bipartisan brainchild of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) and Chris Coons (D-Delaware). The bill would grant the NCAA its long-sought antitrust immunity to impose rules on eligibility, the transfer portal and athlete compensation. It also looks to halt further realignment at the major conference level while allowing schools to pool their media rights and sell them as a package.

Like with almost any piece of legislation, it has its share of opponents, including athlete labor groups — who loathe any earning caps and feel the bill could stunt future organizing efforts — plus the SEC and Big Ten. The Power 2, long in favor of congressional intervention in college sports, are standing against this bill as written, particularly because of how it deals with media rights and potential expansion. When sports are on the table, the alliances get weird.

Last year, the SCORE Act fell apart in the House, never reaching a full floor vote. Among the many reasons it failed, one was that it tried to do too much, giving opposing lobbyists and politicians a long list of ways to rally support against it. This Senate bill slimmed down on the labor front, which meant not including a prohibition on athletes becoming employees. But when it beefed up in other areas, the SEC and Big Ten objected, leading one Republican Senate aide to tell me: “This is hard enough to get 60 votes on without fighting with the two biggest, richest conferences.”

According to Yahoo, the two conferences are working on recommendations for the bill. On June 3, after the first hearing for the bill, I asked Cantwell if she was wary of this becoming the SEC and Big Ten versus everyone else. She laughed.

“It already has been that,” Cantwell said. “I think from the very beginning. I mean, not because we want to make it that. They just have a different viewpoint. I think the big story here is that the ACC and Big 12 are saying: I don’t want to be the Pac 12. Don’t come and eat my best parts and then leave me with scraps.”

That’s the type of subtext that has linked sports and politics even tighter in recent weeks. A bill for college sports in 2026 is also about Washington State getting screwed in conference realignment in 2022, which still angers Cantwell. A goal in the World Cup is also about the White House’s (now unsuccessful) push to eliminate birthright citizenship, since the U.S.’s top scorer was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents who were about to return to London (which is where Folarin Balogun ultimately grew up).

After earning a red card in the U.S.’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina, Balogun was initially ineligible for the team’s Round of 16 match against Belgium on Monday. On Sunday, though, FIFA ruled that Balogun could play — and almost immediately after the decision, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social, posting: “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” NOTUS confirmed that Trump had called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to request a review of the situation. The Royal Belgian Football Association then said in a statement that it was “astonished” by this development.

Republicans tend to claim college football. Democrats are gripping tight to the World Cup. The president can be a heat-seeking missile for any sports story of the moment. And with everyone wanting a piece of the discourse, there’s more than enough to go around.

“We don’t have anything else with this amount of value that we also still have very organic feelings about,” said Bass, the sports and politics professor. “Even as fans are being priced out of everything, even if every stadium is named for a bank or whatever, we have more access to sports than ever before. And so it becomes a critical way to access people.”