Maga hats, anti-Ice banners and plenty of confusion: did MLS create its own political mess?

The Guardian

6 days ago

The man in the Make America Great Again hat could not have been more direct.
'I'm being evicted from the premises because we can't wear Donald Trump hats in public,' he said to his camera from the stands at a St Louis City game in late July. A security official lingered in the background, asking him to leave as he delivered his next line: 'Trump is not welcome here.'
The man, Michael Weitzel, is a season ticket holder who was eventually led outside the gates of the stadium as the security official told him that he sympathized, that he was a 'Trumper' too, but that he had to follow policy.
Weitzel's video is fairly tame, as these things go – the situation never escalates beyond a somewhat exasperated conversation. It went viral nonetheless, with a parade of influencers and publications that don't ordinarily pay much attention to Major League Soccer suddenly taking a very keen interest in what seemed to be a landmark one-sided enforcement against political speech. Some even called it a first amendment issue – which it isn't, because the first amendment concerns government action and MLS is a private business.
What it is, though, is the latest of a long line of incidents to shine a spotlight on MLS's fan code of conduct, which has banned political displays in some form for much of the league's history. Regardless of wording, the policy has seemingly always been a controversy magnet. It is also emblematic of one of MLS's foundational challenges as it pursues its goal of being one of the top leagues of the world – how to live up to both the norms of global soccer, and those of major American sports leagues, even when the two are wildly different.
League commissioner Don Garber defended the policy earlier this year when asked by the Guardian about anti-Ice signs and banners that were confiscated at various games – actions that have caused a revolt among multiple supporters' groups.
'We want our stadiums to stay safe,' Garber said. 'We want to ensure that we're having displays that are not going to incite anyone, and at the same time not take care of one audience, and at the same time having to deal with another audience that might be on the other side of this issue. The best way to do that is to have the policy we have.'
MLS has discouraged political displays in its fan code of conduct for many years, with the removal of banners reading 'Refugees welcome' from a Toronto FC game in 2015 standing as an early example. The league's policy at the time simply asked fans to create an environment 'free from … political or inciting messages'. A new wording, instituted at the start of the 2019 season, was slightly more specific, banning the use of 'political … language and/or gestures'. In each case, MLS, its clubs, and the security officials hired for each game were given a wide berth to determine what was and was not political. This was swiftly identified as a problem by the Independent Supporters' Council (ISC), an organization representing the league's supporters' groups.
'We, as an organization, feel strongly on ensuring that displays of human rights are not mistaken for political statements,' a 2019 ISC statement read in part. 'Political engagement is sometimes necessary in securing human rights for all, but that does not make the message of human rights inherently political.'
The statement turned out to be prescient. Months after it was issued, the league drew the ire of several groups by banning the display of the 'Iron Front' symbol, a logo featuring a trio of encircled arrows pointing diagonally downward. The symbol was first used by an anti-Nazi paramilitary group during the second world war. It is now a lesser-known but graphically impactful way of expressing anti-fascist sentiment. MLS determined that the symbol represented a political movement (antifa), and banned it. The fans resisted. Within months, the ban was dropped, and the policy changed to the version that rules the league today. This version outlaws 'electioneering, campaigning or advocating for or against any candidate, political party, legislative issue, or government action.'
The new language seemed like it might have clarified things by inserting more specific language. Yet situations like Weitzel's, or the anti-Ice banner removals, or the New England Revolution's removal of a 'Free Rumeysa' banner, continue to raise questions about the scope of the policy, and how it is best enforced.
'I think it's a quite confusing and unclear rule,' said Emerson Sykes, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU, who is a soccer fan and has researched MLS's policy and its recent headline-grabbing controversies. 'I think when you apply these rules to these different situations, the problem with vague rules comes into play, specifically the issue of consistent enforcement. So there's the rule and then there's how it's actually experienced by folks. The same banner in one place might not mean the same thing in another place and that's just the nature of speech and what makes it very difficult to enforce these kinds of rules. That's why we really don't let the government do it. This is a private entity, so they're allowed to do it, but some of the same pitfalls show up.'
MLS, for its part, is aware of the difficulty of enforcement across 30 teams in 28 cities spanning two countries, in venues where different private security companies may be making the decisions on the ground. A source with knowledge of the league's thinking on the policy, who was granted anonymity to protect relationships within the game, told the Guardian that league officials believe the St Louis situation could have been handled differently, but that they consider it and other headline-grabbing situations like it to be the exception rather than the norm.
Still, it's hard to imagine that situations like that won't come up again, especially amid the second Trump administration's headlong dive into authoritarianism. The United States' political candidates, legislative issues, and actions increasingly have a direct impact on MLS's own fans – perhaps moreso than at any point in the history of the league. This is especially true of Hispanic and Latin American communities that MLS has previously estimated comprise about 30% of its fanbase. These are communities which have been the target of repeated raids by Ice, and who have been specifically demonized by Trump and his most senior advisers.
In MLS, though, fans and officials must walk a tightrope. The source familiar with MLS's thinking said that often, an acceptable fan display comes down to framing. 'Abolish Ice,' the source said, is a message that the league considers to have nothing to do with the game, does not overlap with human rights, and is a straightforwardly adversarial political statement. The Nashville SC supporters' banner reading 'We're not all here,' meanwhile, is deemed to be acceptable – a reference to the fact that Ice is affecting the community of fans in the stands, without referencing the agency directly. Similarly, they said that while the league would most likely consider an anti-supreme court message in the wake of the overturning Roe v Wade to have been against policy, a banner that read 'abortion is healthcare' would be deemed more acceptable.
Ultimately, the source stressed that the league's focus above all else is on risk management on a game-by-game basis. Political messages, which can be inciting on their own, can get taken to a new level in the middle of the heightened emotions of a full stadium, where alcohol is commonplace and judgements are impaired as a result.
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'I understand the need to bring the real world into sports and the power that can come from that kind of advocacy,' said Sykes. 'And I also understand that these leagues are not political entities. … Most of them are trying not to necessarily alienate huge swaths of people based on politics when they don't really need to in order to sell their products. I am in no way discouraging or disparaging athlete activists, they are some of my favorite people in history, but I do understand why a league would be hesitant to have their stadium and their games become political side shows. At some level it's inescapable because politics is everywhere, identities are everywhere, but it is not a political forum. It is not a political debate. It's not a political rally. It's a sporting event and so it's understandable that some different rules might apply.'
MLS is in regular communication with the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL about security procedures, yet the league is an outlier even among those North American men's major leagues. All have fan codes of conduct either league-wide or for individual teams, but few of those codes of conduct mention politics – and when they do, it's often specifically about banning political signs or banners, not a blanket ban on political displays. Among the most popular women's leagues, the NWSL's fan code of conduct closely mirrors that of MLS. The WNBA's doesn't mention politics.
Elsewhere in soccer, none of Europe's five major men's soccer leagues (the Premier League, Serie A, Bundesliga, La Liga and Ligue 1) have an official policy concerning political speech from fans, though individual clubs may. For some clubs, political displays from fans are expected or even encouraged, with traditions dating back generations. But comparisons are difficult, in part because of how the game has evolved with most clubs around the world, which were often founded as cultural institutions, while MLS and every other North American major sports league have only ever intended to be business-first.
'The norms around fan conduct very so widely across countries and across leagues,' Sykes points out. 'It can be difficult to draw any direct lines and it's really so context specific – what MLS thinks is going to be inciting versus what is actually inciting is one question but also what's going to be inciting in one stadium and one city or in one league might be very different from another.'
Aside from the NWSL, MLS's political policy falls most closely in line with entities that oversee international soccer: Concacaf, Uefa, Caf, the AFC, OFC and Fifa. In each of those cases, the confederations have faced numerous allegations of inconsistency. This was most recently notable in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, where Reuters and other outlets reported that stadium security allowed fans wearing 'Free Palestine' shirts into games, while removing those who wore shirts supporting Iran's 'Woman, life freedom' protests.
In both of those cases, the line between the political actions of a government and a human rights issue is blurred. In the United States in 2025 it is much the same. 'Make America Great Again' is of course associated closely with one particular political figure, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue it isn't a social and cultural movement as well (not to mention the fact that Trump is no longer a candidate for office, as Sykes points out, thus theoretically making him exempt from MLS's policy). Ice is a government entity empowered by legislation, but people are protesting its actions, which just one report links to at least 510 credible human rights violations.
Multiple MLS officials who spoke on background for this piece stressed that the process of enforcing the policy is collective between the clubs, supporters' groups, security and the league office, but it's still unclear if there is a way to enforce MLS's no politics rule without occasionally curtailing the ability of fans to speak out in favor of human rights.
It also opens up plenty of room for hypocrisy. MLS has banned both Israeli and Palestinian flags from its venues, with special dispensation given in the case of an Israeli or Palestinian players' presence on a roster, and usually only when displayed in a supporters' section and hung from the stadium. The ban on political speech has been used as justification for this. Yet the US flag, representing a country that is responsible for no shortage of geopolitically fraught conflicts, gets a moment in the spotlight at nearly every game with the playing of the national anthem, a tradition across all North American major sports leagues. Political statements as passive as wearing a hat or holding a banner might get a fan kicked out of an MLS game, but team owners may donate many millions of dollars to political candidates and Pacs without consequence.
MLS could rescind its policy or leave it up to individual clubs, but doing so could open the door to any number of conflicts between fans in an era of heightened political tension, in a culture unused to those sorts of things happening at sporting events, with a president who will seize upon it for personal gain. In the minds of MLS, this not only makes games less safe, it also would bring the league further from the financial and cultural juggernauts of the nation's other sports leagues – a unique factor that few other domestic soccer competitions in the world deal with in quite the same way.
Ultimately, one source said, MLS is more concerned with its own position than its fans' beliefs.