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For Dr. Céline Gounder, clinical associate professor of medicine and infectious diseases at NYU medical school and a medical correspondent at CBS News, this World Cup has hit hard. Her late husband Grant Wahl, for decades the preeminent soccer journalist in the United States, died at the Qatar World Cup in 2022, after collapsing while covering a quarterfinal match between Argentina and the Netherlands. The cause of death was an undetected ascending aortic aneurysm. Wahl was 49. 

Gounder, who lives in New York City, knows Wahl would be writing, podcasting, and doing videos, with great joy, about the sterling performances from the likes of Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi, and Erling Haaland. Wahl would appreciate the packed stadiums and the cultural commingling at this World Cup: phenomena like Scotland’s Tartan Army and Japanese visitors trying Texas BBQ for the first time speak to everything Wahl loved about the planet’s most popular sport. At the same time, Wahl would have turned his critical eye toward those in power, especially after FIFA reversed a suspension earlier this week of American striker Folarin Balogun, following a phone call between FIFA president Gianni Infantino and U.S. President Donald Trump. 

“It feels like there is a Grant-sized hole in the world right now,” says Gounder. “Because I know he would be going apesh-t on this.” 

The Somali referee denied a visa into the U.S. The controversial treatment of the Iranian team during their World Cup stay. European officials and others crying foul over the perceived coziness between Trump and Infantino, who bestowed upon Trump an out-of-thin-air peace prize at the World Cup draw in Washington, D.C., in December: Wahl would have been all over these stories of geopolitical intrigue, while still expertly writing about the action on the pitch. Throughout his career, Wahl toed a fine journalistic line. He cheered the beauty and growth of soccer, especially in the United States, while in no way acting like a cheerleader.

“Part of his hating ‘stick to sports’ was when you say ‘stick to sports,’ you're also implying sports is somehow lesser than,” says Gounder, who married Wahl in 2001. “To him sports was just as serious as any other journalistic beat.” 

This was supposed to be Wahl’s World Cup, a career capstone in the country in which his coverage, of both men’s and women’s soccer, helped fuel the growth of the sport. At Wahl’s first World Cup as a journalist, in France in 1998, soccer was such an afterthought that two other Sports Illustrated writers returned home before the final: Wahl covered the France-Brazil game, at 24, for the preeminent sports publication in the United States and took ownership of a beat that so many of his peers overlooked. Wahl embraced the upstart digital-media space, bringing an insider’s knowledge to his substantial online following, while still writing long-form soccer features that delivered depth and insight about the game’s most prominent players.

A number of factors delivered the United States its first World Cup hosting gig since 1994: the size and buying power of the U.S. market; technological delivery of top-flight European pro games to U.S. homes and phones, driving soccer engagement in the country; high levels of youth participation. But Wahl’s passionate coverage surely contributed to the World Cup’s return to North America. And the robust media attention to this summer’s event—for example, a single story in The Athletic, on penalty shoot-outs, carried a dozen bylines—can be traced to Wahl’s influence. He mentored many younger journalists and set the standard for covering the game. 

“More than anything, he saw the soccer explosion coming,” says Seth Davis, Wahl’s former Sports Illustrated colleague on the college-basketball beat, which Wahl also worked until turning to soccer full-time before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. 

The Balogun controversy was ripe for Wahl’s reporting. Balogun, who received a questionable red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Round of 32 on July 1, was supposed to, by rule, sit out the next game. FIFA’s intervention the day before the Belgium game sparked outrage. Belgium beat the U.S. regardless on Monday, 4-1, in the round of 16. 

“I wish that Grant could have written about it, so I would know what to think,” says Davis, longtime contributor to CBS Sports’ March Madness coverage and editor-in-chief of Hoops HQ, a college-basketball site. “Grant would have been the guy who I would have read his opinion, and then an hour later I would be in a sports bar, talking to my buddies, giving that opinion as if it was my own.” 

Wahl’s older brother, Eric, a writer and marketer based in Kansas City, Mo., called for Balogun to sit out the game on his own. “I think Grant would have disagreed with me on that count,” says Eric, 56. “Grant would have said the coach who was selected for this job is the final arbiter of how this plays out.” Balogun played most of the Belgium game. Eric thinks Grant would have probably written a longer piece looking at whether there was “shared corruption, for lack of a better phrase, between FIFA and the Trump Administration.”

“He would have been burning up the phones before the game, working his sources,” says Mark Mravic, Wahl’s longtime editor at both Sports Illustrated and the Substack, Fútbol with Grant Wahl,  he had started before his passing. “He had sources in the U.S. government, in addition to those within U.S. Soccer and FIFA. He would be probably working two or three different stories at the same time, and just juggling them, and filing. He'd be working social media. At this point he'd probably be very heavily involved in video. He would have been super busy.” 

But once game time kicked off, Wahl would have made a point of paying close attention to the action unfolding, to prepare his piece on the game. Wahl would have been disappointed in the Belgium result, says Mravic, “but he would have compartmentalized his journalistic mind to say, ‘Here's what went wrong and here's why it went wrong.’ The big question always at the end of the World Cup for the U.S. is, ‘Where do we go from here?’ He would certainly have had strong thoughts on where this team and these particular players are headed. And drawing even farther back, what has this World Cup meant for soccer in America?” 

Wahl would have objected, Eric says, to an Athletic hot take that followed the U.S. loss, a commentary headlined “Let’s admit it: The United States is never going to win a men’s World Cup.” “That is crap that Grant would have never stood for,” says Eric. “We absolutely will.”

Growing up in the Kansas City suburb of Mission, Kan., Wahl played some youth soccer. “I think he liked it mainly because he got giant orange slices he could slide into his mouth and pretend that he was a linebacker,” says Eric. Wahl, a politics major at Princeton, spent the summer before his senior year in Argentina, researching his thesis, "Playing the Political Game: Soccer Clubs in Argentine Civil Society." (Wahl was bilingual, and interviewed Lionel Messi in Spanish for a Sports Illustrated cover.) He joined Sports Illustrated soon after graduating college in 1996, and left in 2020, before starting his Substack. 

He relished the editorial freedom that working for himself provided. Before the 2022 World Cup, Wahl made several reporting trips to Qatar to talk to migrant workers about their mistreatment while building stadiums and other infrastructure for the event. In Qatar, he wore a rainbow shirt to a game he was covering: same-sex relationships are criminalized in that country. “At the time, I had suggested that maybe he not do that, because Grant's big thing was never be the story yourself,” says Eric, who is gay. “But I think, at least in my conversations with Grant before he did it, he was doing it not just for me, which I appreciated, but to try to draw attention to what he felt was the hypocrisy of FIFA and specifically the Qatar World Cup committee. He wanted to know a bit about what it felt like to be a person who couldn't hide who they were. He wanted to feel some of that negative feedback. To get an idea of what people go through. I don't know too many people who were like that.” Security guards detained Wahl for some 25 minutes: they initially demanded he remove his shirt and confiscated his phone. Wahl was eventually released and covered the USA-Wales game. A FIFA rep apologized.

On a podcast the day before his passing, Wahl said he wasn’t sleeping much, had a case of bronchitis, and visited the media-center medical clinic twice. So when Gounder texted Eric on Dec. 9, informing him that Grant had collapsed in the press box, Eric didn’t think too much of it. “I wasn’t surprised,” says Eric. “‘Well, that big dummy.’ We were used to Grant working himself into sickness. He was the absolute definition of a workaholic.” The messages from Gounder got more grave. 

“They just don’t care,” read the lede of Wahl’s penultimate piece; the story detailed the crass indifference of the Qatari World Cup CEO, when asked about the death of a Filipino migrant worker, in an accident at Saudi Arabia’s training resort during the group stage. (“This is something that you want to talk about right now?” the official responded when a reporter asked about the worker’s death. “I mean, death is a natural part of life.”) To the very end, Wahl called it like he saw it. 

Eric discovered through genetic testing that he carries the same genetic mutation as Grant that disposes him to aortic ruptures. He partners with the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health to advocate for early detection and family screening. “It would have been important to Grant to know that

we wanted to take as much of our pain as possible and try to put it toward some kind of positive action,” says Eric. 

A collection of Wahl’s pieces, World Class: Purpose, Passion, and the Pursuit of Greatness On and Off the Field, curated by Mravic and Alexander Wolff, another Sports Illustrated friend and colleague, was released as a book in 2024. Eric narrated “they just don’t care” for the audio version. “I had to go home after that, because I just couldn't finish the rest of the day,” he says. 

This summer the American Outlaws, the U.S. soccer team fan group, carried a picture of Wahl on their pregame march to the World Cup stadiums. Gounder now wonders if Wahl would have revived his attempt, from 15 years ago, to run for FIFA president. His radical-transparency platform reads especially prescient today. The Library of Congress has reached out to Gounder and is in the process of collecting Wahl’s papers. “Though his career was cut short, we want to preserve Mr. Wahl’s contributions to the intersection of writing, sports, and human rights as part of our national collections that document the full scope of American history and culture," Sherri Sheu, a modern American historian at the Library of Congress, writes in an email. Wahl’s papers will be part of its collections that also include the likes of Jackie Robinson, Katharine Graham, and legendary New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. 

Gounder has watched one World Cup game, the Uruguay-Spain group-stage matchup on June 26. A friend, wanting to help her during this tough time, joined her at Wahl’s favorite soccer bar near their New York City home. Gounder wore a Grant Wahl memorial jersey: a bunch of people recognized it and offered her well-wishes.  

On Monday night, however, Gounder spent a few hours breaking down in tears. “I miss him now more than ever,” she says. “And I know I'm not the only one.”

Correction, July 10

The original version of this story misspelled the last name of a modern American historian at the Library of Congress. It is Sheu, not Seau.