A resurfaced audio clip is putting Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on defense over comments he made about America's most popular sport.
The Michigan Republican Party posted the audio online Monday, according to Fox News. In a 2023 podcast episode, El-Sayed — the Democrat running for Michigan's open Senate seat — questioned whether football can be considered "ethical" or "safe" because of the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma in contact sports.
The clip lands in the middle of a Senate race where El-Sayed has worked hard to court male voters, often posting fitness content and defending masculinity while criticizing his own party for talking down to men. Now his own words about the sport millions of Michiganders grew up playing — from Friday night high school games to Sunday afternoons at Ford Field — are circulating under a spotlight he did not choose.
The Comments and the Politics Around Them
Fox News reported that El-Sayed questioned in the podcast whether American football could be considered ethical or safe given CTE risks, and that he tied football culture to toxic masculinity and violence. That is the substance of the clip. The rest of the context is where the campaign gets interesting.
El-Sayed has criticized football before — and recently. Earlier this month he released a video in which he threw and caught a football while questioning the cost of attending NFL games, pointing to ticket prices, concession spending, and the taxpayer-funded stadiums that still produce climbing prices at the gate.
That is a populist argument about money. The resurfaced podcast audio is something else: a question about whether the sport itself is ethical. In a state where high school football is a Friday night institution and the Detroit Lions are a civic religion, those two things do not play the same way — and El-Sayed's opponents know it.
The Michigan GOP clearly understands the difference. The party posted the audio online Monday, timing it to maximum effect for a Democratic candidate whose entire pitch depends on not sounding like the kind of politician who lectures working-class voters about their pastimes.
CTE Is Real — and Football Families Are Not the Enemy
None of this means CTE is a made-up problem. It is not. Parents, coaches, and league officials at every level have spent years debating how to make the game safer, and those conversations matter. Nobody wants to see a kid get hurt.
But there is a difference between demanding safer rules and questioning whether a sport 16 million Americans play is "ethical" at all. The first is a policy position. The second is a judgment about the people who play it, coach it, and pack the stands every weekend.
That is the tension El-Sayed now has to manage. He has spent months telling Michigan men he respects them and their culture, according to Fox News. The resurfaced audio complicates that message, sourced directly from his own microphone three years ago.
According to Fox News, El-Sayed has also defended masculinity in public comments and chided Democrats for talking down to men. That makes the 2023 podcast clip a political problem, not just an ideological one: it invites voters to ask which version of the candidate is real — the one in the video tossing a football, or the one on the podcast questioning whether the sport should exist in good conscience.
More Than One Outlet Is Carrying It
The clip was reported by Fox News and picked up by outlets including 930 WFMD Free Talk and USPress.News. The audio was posted online Monday by the Michigan Republican Party, according to Fox News' reporting. The El-Sayed campaign had not issued a response to the clip as of Sunday, according to those same reports.
Whether the campaign responds, and how, will matter. In a state decided by fewer than 80,000 votes the last time Democrats won it statewide, a Friday night football crowd is not a niche audience. It is the electorate.
Democrats have spent years telling voters that Republicans are the party of cultural contempt — the ones who look down on what ordinary people love. One old podcast clip does not erase that script. But it gives Michigan Republicans a line they did not previously have, and they are already using it.
Our Take
Let's be honest about what this is. Abdul El-Sayed is not running for Senate because he cares what happens at the line of scrimmage. He is running as a progressive who wants Michiganders to trust him with a vote. And the audio shows a candidate, in his own voice, treating a beloved American tradition as a moral problem to be solved.
Patriots, ask yourself this: if someone running for the United States Senate can look at a Friday night in small-town Michigan and wonder whether it should even be allowed, what else about your life will they question once they get to Washington? Your truck? Your church? Your kid's tackle football league?
The CTE conversation is worth having. Every parent who has watched their kid take a hit deserves a straight answer about safety. But there is a difference between making a sport safer and calling the people who love it immoral. El-Sayed crossed that line. The Michigan GOP just reminded everybody.
Every Michigander who has ever cheered from the bleachers on a cold October night now has one more reason to show up in November and send the message loud and clear: we are not the problem, and we are not going away.
Will the El-Sayed campaign apologize for the clip, or double down on it? Either answer tells voters exactly who they are electing.
