An American sports journalist and soccer analyst for CBS Sports, Grant Wahl was best known for having been a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and a correspondent for Fox Sports.
Wahl attended Princeton University. During his first year at college, he covered the Princeton Tigers men’s soccer team, then coached by Bob Bradley, who would go on to manage Major League Soccer teams and the United States national team.
His Sports career mainly focused on college basketball and soccer in the United States. Wahl ran for the FIFA presidency in 2011 but withdrew his campaign after failing to receive an endorsement from a football association.
Wahl left Sports Illustrated in 2020 and founded his Substack newsletter. Wahl died while covering the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, where he had been arrested for wearing a shirt with a rainbow and had also been investigating migrant labor mistreatment in the country.
Why was Grant Wahl detained in Qatar?
Grant Wahl became headlines earlier in the 2022 World tournament when he was detained by security staff at Qatar’s Ahmad bin Ali Stadium for wearing a rainbow shirt to the United States World Cup opener against Wales. He said he wore the shirt as a show of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar.