in the field: karim zidan of sports politika
"All I really want from people is an awareness of what's going on around you so that your passion is not exploited by bad actors."
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I am so excited to share this next installment of In the Field with you, the series where I interview people who are doing great work in sports journalism. I have been a fan of
’s work for a long time, and his newsletter, is doing some of the best sports reporting out there, in my mind.
Karim is able to weave sports and politics together in a way few can. He sees the connections others miss, and is on the story before long before most mainstream publications. His reporting on the relationship between Donald Trump and UFC is the most long-standing and thorough that I’ve seen, and his three-episode podcast on the topic is essential listening for anyone hoping to understand how Trump leveraged the audience of combat sports to ascend to the presidency. Karim writes about neo-Nazi movements infiltrating mixed martial arts, about the impacts that the ongoing genocide in Gaza has on Palestinian sports and athletes. He looks at international governing bodies and the ways they fail on a geopolitical level, from FIFA to the International Olympic Committee.
He is the kind of writer I recommend reading even if you think you don’t care about sports, because he shows why sports is so much bigger than just what is happening on the field. If you want to understand international politics and the (often unseen) role that sports plays in them, there’s no one better than Karim to show you. Karim splits his time between Canada and Egypt, and has written for outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian. In a horrifying incident last year, his reporting on Israeli MMA fighters resulted in one of them writing his name on an artillery shell bound for Gaza.
Below, Karim and I discuss who has the privilege to ignore the political side of sports, the moving goalposts when it comes to getting our work published by mainstream publications, and why he doesn’t really consider himself a sports writer. Read Karim’s work at
and follow him on Bluesky.Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Out of Your League: I feel like you and I have both been on beats for a long time where we're like, ‘You should be paying attention to this,’ and people are not paying attention to this. And then suddenly your work is very relevant.
Karim Zidan: It's quite strange. I've been covering Trump since I first saw Dana White, the UFC president, go on stage at the Republican National Convention in 2016. And nobody took it seriously. Nobody. I don't think most of us took it seriously at the time. At first, it just felt a bit strange and absurd, almost like, ‘What sort of alternative dimension are we living in?’
But it just kept getting more and more surreal, but also more revealing in strange ways. As the years went on, it became beyond ridiculous seeing the amount of fighters who were campaigning for [Trump] in 2020, the rise of things like QAnon, and the amount of fighters who started ascribing themselves to these conspiracy theories. And then we entered this new phase of this New Right, and masculinity and toxicity and fight culture just became so synonymous with the rise of the modern Right and the return of Trump, so much so that, I'd say, its whole network—from its podcast to its conservative fan base—were pivotal to the return of Donald Trump in 2024. If you had asked me back in 2016 when I was reporting all this stuff for [publications] like Bloody Elbow, I don't think I would have ever been able to say that this would be the case now, but here we are.
OOYL: Something I wonder all the time: is this man a genius who has slowly been playing the longest game possible? Or just an incredibly lucky opportunist who has been able to leverage things at the right time? Or both? I don't actually even really have the answer.
KZ: You know, I ask myself this all the time, but I think I've come to sort of a steady conclusion here. I know the fun response people like that is that with Trump, you just look and watch and you hear things he says in his weird cadence and you just want to think, ‘What a buffoon.’ But you have to admit there has to be just a little bit of cunningness there, as well. There has to be.
It's evident to me, at least, just by the people he has chosen to associate with over the years and his understanding of the role things like pro wrestling, mixed martial arts, and boxing play in society. It's something we've heard him quoted on since the ‘80s. I remember a Philadelphia Inquirer article from the 1980s where the journalist asked Donald Trump, ‘So what is it about boxing?’ This was at a time where Trump was running his casinos in Atlantic City and was hosting Mike Tyson fights. This was his first big entry into the world of combat sports outside of pro wrestling. So he gets asked this question, and his response, I think, is really key here, which is, ‘Well, it’s so much more entertaining than the ballet or the opera, isn't it?’ I think that says a lot for how he viewed the sports and how he understood their role. It's a spectacle, and Trump always wanted to be involved in the spectacle.
OOYL: Ok, let’s back up for a minute. How do you describe your beat and your work for someone who is not familiar with what you do?
KZ: I always tell people that I operate at the intersection of sports and politics. I'm not exactly a sports writer. I'm not exactly a politics writer, either. I know more about politics than your average sports writer, and I know more about sports than your average politics writer, and that's kind of the position I occupy. When I started writing about sports and politics, nobody even understood what that meant. Sports and politics, they don't mix.
We went through that mainstream understanding to suddenly terms like ‘sportswashing’ were popular, and people were talking about all these major events that had evolved in Qatar, etc. But I think what happened was when people actually watched the [2022] World Cup take place in Qatar, that was, for all intents and purposes, pretty well done. And also had some of the best football that a World Cup has had in a decade. That led to people being like, ‘Oh, this was overblown, wasn't it?’ And that's not true. Of course it wasn't overblown. The amount of death and destruction and exploitation that was caused in order to lead to this World Cup was all 100% real. But that’s not what people took away. And I think it's only enabled more bad actors—actually worse actors—to get involved. I think the success of Qatar 2022 leads us to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would not be preparing itself for 2034 World Cup without that.
OOYL: Obviously our work is very different, but also quite aligned in the perspective that we take. I also am not a ‘sports writer,’ in the traditional sense. I’ve only one time ever covered a live sports event, and it was mostly because of opportunity. I had to write a gamer1 on deadline after it was over and thank God for the other people in the press box who really came through and were like, ‘Let me teach you how to write a gamer.’ So that is also not my bread and butter, either. But sports doesn't exist in the vacuum that people like to pretend that it does.
KZ: I think it's interesting for me to see the people who can automatically subscribe to that and understand that sports is not created in a vacuum. And then you have the people who are just determined to utilize it as a means of escapism. I think a lot of that comes down to your upbringing, where you fall in society in general—are you part of a minority group? Has your life been politicized in a way that mainstream society has not, that would automatically open your eyes and lift the curtain there, and suddenly you see politics in everything? But for a lot of people who live a relatively privileged upbringing, you don't have to worry about things like human rights abuses because for the most part, it doesn't affect your personal life. It's easy to just view sports as romanticized entities and storylines and games and not break it down much further than that. I think for people like us, that's just not possible, is it? When people ask me that question, ‘How did we start seeing politics in sports,’ my answer is always the same: I did not have a choice.
I grew up in Egypt. My teenage years are in the lead up to the Arab Spring, or the Egyptian Revolution, and times were tense in Egypt. And in many ways, life as a teen felt very hopeless. My cousins would take me to these football games, and we’d chant all these slogans targeting the government and the police forces that were on the field at the time. It was so cathartic, and it was harmless but the state didn't see it as harmless. They would target us. I remember friends of mine being picked out of the stands and beaten with baton. I was 14 years old at the time. Can I explain to a 14-year-old why something like that happened at a football game, and yet it comes down to politics at the end of the day. So we would talk from a young age, that just because you're watching a football game doesn't mean that it operates in its own bubble.
OOYL: You've mentioned these global events—my newsletter largely has a Western audience—and a lot of people are not necessarily engaging with sports on an international level unless it’s the Olympics or the World Cup or something like that. But all of those sporting events are obviously highly politicized. It’s like, how do you have a meeting of all of these different geopolitical dynamics and have it just be about sports? It seems like an almost impossible feat.
KZ: Yet by some miracle, some people manage to achieve it. I don't know what this really intense, willful ignorance is about. But people are capable of remarkable things, and one of them is really just stubbornly believing that sports are a means for escapism. And listen, I can to a certain extent, respect somebody's craving for escapism. I will watch random sitcoms in the evening because it's just so easy on the brain that I can just sit and rest while I'm doing that. And you can understand how sports can be that for people, and I'm not asking you to give up those sports.
I don't think I've ever written an article that has called for a boycott. Maybe because in this day and age, boycotts don’t work very well unless they're exceptionally well-targeted—the BDS movement is a great example of that in Palestine. All I really want from people is an awareness— being aware of what's going on around you so that at least you are not exploited, your identity is not exploited, your passion is not exploited by bad actors.
OOYL: You mentioned Palestine, and you are one of the few sports writers who has been consistently writing about Palestine and centering the Palestinian perspective since October 7 (and before then, too). There's been overwhelming silence from much of the sports world, and your reporting is often where I have looked to fill the gap in that space because there really has been so little. Can you talk about that aspect of your work and how it's been received?
KZ: I have done plenty of articles on Palestine in the past, and usually whenever violence picked up and there were incidents in the West Bank, for example, of things I could tie back to football, etc. But I really took it with new zeal when October 7 happened, and a lot of that reporting went up for Sports Politika.
I think a lot of people ended up looking towards my reporting, and I think that’s a problem. I found my work cited in academic articles. I started getting called for interviews to talk about Palestine, and it broke my heart in some ways, because it took me just a couple of months to be considered an expert on this subject. That's heartbreaking, because there are Palestinian voices who should have been centered. And at the same time, all our colleagues in the sports world should have been covering the story. My work for my newsletter should not have made such a dent in the way that it did. It's just a shame that there wasn't really that much work being represented to begin with. The pool was so small, it was easy to find my work there, and that wouldn't have been the case if there were more people reporting on this.
And even the people who did end up truly making an effort and reporting on this beyond just one article ended up being people who were women, minorities. These were Muslim journalists for the most part, or extreme allies who've been in this for a long time—I'm thinking of like a Dave Zirin, Jules Boykoff, people like that. But otherwise, it just felt like, unless you're somebody who feels for the people, and by that I mean you're looking at people who are being ethnically cleansed who look just like you. There's a deep feeling that comes from that, and it's not a good one, and that's the place we were coming from when we're doing this type of reporting.
I wish it didn't have to just wait until it's people like them or who look like them who are being targeted for them to feel something. You should have already wanted to write about this. A lot of people who do great work in the sports and politics [realm] came up to me and said, ‘We rely on your reporting because it's so nuanced, it's so complex. It's so well-written in terms of the Palestinian voice in it. You have up-to-date content. You speak Arabic. And we don't have any of that. We don't have the context, the history, the political understanding, the Arabic.’
I'm like, well, apart from learning Arabic—which is not essential, Google Translate can do a good amount of that—Arabic numerals are the same as English so getting the actual stats isn’t that difficult. And when it comes to the politics of a region, learn about it. Do you think I was born with a knowledge of Saudi Arabia? I was born in Egypt. So people could say, shouldn't that make me an expert in the entire Middle East region? But it's kind of racist, the assumption that I'm from one country so I suddenly know all these other countries.
I love history. I love politics. I study and I read a lot of these books and talk to a lot of people, but it's the same for any other place. When I had to learn about Russia, it took me time to build that reservoir of knowledge. I was reading books. I was traveling constantly, back and forth to Russia, asking questions, traveling to different places. And I'm not even saying the travel has to be essential for people now, but what's so hard about reading and learning instead of just saying, ‘Oh, this is too complex a subject, I'm afraid of pissing people off?’ If you are afraid of pissing people off, you are in the wrong fucking industry. It's that simple.
OOYL: I think I came at wanting to write about Palestine from almost the opposite perspective—Dave Zirin comes from this place too, with both of us being Jewish people—of being like, ‘not in our name.’ I felt that obligation. And like you're saying, your newsletter is the place where you're writing all of this. I can tell you, as someone who was trying to place these stories, no one wanted to take them.
I tried to write about the NWSL teams banning season ticket holders from stadiums for bringing signs in support of Palestine. It happened at several NWSL stadiums. I talked to a bunch of fans. I had video, I had photos, I had all of this stuff. And I approached a bunch of outlets. Nobody wanted it. One outlet said to me, we would only want it if one of the fans had a video of the incident go viral on TikTok first, and then we would want the first interview with them. Literally, that was the bar to commission something like that. And the goalposts are constantly moving—it’s ‘this is too controversial,’ then it’s ‘if it goes viral on TikTok first.’ The bar for these kinds of stories that you are writing, and that I often am writing, is so high. And that is probably why you have a newsletter where you can do this kind of work.
KZ: I feel like this is an editorial issue that's across sports, too. Because, funny enough, it immediately struck me that for years, when I had pitched stories about the rise of the far right within the mixed martial combat sports space and alongside Donald Trump etc, I’d get these snarky responses from editors, including the New York Times. The New York Times eventually listened to me and published a bunch of my stories, but it took a while. They were snarky about it at first. The Guardian would never take a story from me on pro wrestling because they refused to view it in any way as a serious endeavor, as sports entertainment. And clearly we are seeing that the world of WWE, the UFC, for us not to write about these things and to assume these are ridiculous side shows in the world, it's just not true. That shows that it was a vulnerability in our coverage. And it drives me crazy that those same outfits that rejected those stories from years ago are the same places coming back right now wanting interviews on Donald Trump. Where were you for the last eight years, BBC? I don't know how many times I've been on BBC Radio in the last month. Where were you guys the last eight years?
OOYL: I wanted to ask you about the UFC podcast that you did, In the Red Corner. How did that come about?
KZ: The idea really comes from
, a very talented podcast producer and friend of mine. He reached out a year ago wanting to do a big, overarching podcast series. This was around the same time I got laid off from Bloody Elbow. I was trying to find new work and he calls me up, and he's like, ‘Hey, we're a few months away from the election. I think we should center this podcast into a quick mini series, three or four episodes focused on Donald Trump and the UFC alliance in the lead up to the election.’ We were both so excited about the idea. We really liked working together. He’s Jewish American. I'm Muslim Canadian. And we both have the same understanding that all of these discussions of white supremacy and the far right, they're coming for all of us in the end. So we had this shared understanding that helped buoy this project.He's so talented, he's taking my articles and transforming them into these fantastic scripts and coaching me through the process of voice recording. It was something I hadn't really done before. I'm good at appearing on shows and talking. I'm quite passionate and loud, but to focus myself and to focus my voice in a specific way for a script was very new to me. He'd sit there and coach me for hours as we were working through it. We would have done more than those three episodes, had we had more resources, honestly. That’s always the thing, though, isn’t it?
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A “gamer” is a game summary/recap that posts as close to the end of a game as possible. These are often written quickly from the press box.
Thank you for introducing me to Karim’s work by quoting him in your writing and through re-stacking . I appreciated this deep dive and both of your voices in this difficult space.
Thanks for this Frankie! I love reading Karim's work and this convo was great!