Landon Donovan spent his playing career helping define soccer in the United States. Now, as the World Cup comes to American soil, he’ll be trying to define it for viewers instead. The two identities don’t always go hand in hand. In soccer, as in every sport, being great at the game and being great at talking about it are entirely separate skills, and the graveyard of former stars who never figured out the difference is well-populated.
That’s why Donovan has spent time studying two former athletes and current Fox colleagues he openly aspires to emulate. In a new interview with Front Office Sports, he revealed that those two broadcasters are John Smoltz and Greg Olsen, neither of whom has ever called a soccer match.
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“I think a guy who does it really, really well — John Smoltz, I think, is excellent,” Donovan said. “I love when I watch baseball games, I learn from him. He’s talking really through a pitcher’s lens, but he’s thinking about how to get the pitcher or the batter off balance and what they’re thinking, and I’m just fascinated to listen to that. Greg Olsen, I think, is phenomenal. I love the way he approaches it. Those are kind of two guys I would say I try to model myself after when I’m calling games.”
What Donovan admires in both Smoltz and Olsen is the same thing: their ability to get inside a player’s mind in real time, to explain not just what happened but why, from the perspective of someone who actually played the game at an elite level. That’s exactly the kind of analyst Donovan has been working to become throughout his broadcasting career, which began in 2013 with a guest analyst spot on FS1.
Donovan’s admiration for Olsen specifically isn’t new. He said as much to Awful Announcing two years ago, ahead of Euro 2024, telling us that watching Olsen was one of the few times watching another sport made him feel like he was actually learning.
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“Over time, watching other people and listening to other people, I think my biggest takeaway was ‘Can you add something to the game that the audience wasn’t aware of?’ I watch a lot of sports. I love watching sports; someone like Greg Olsen, every time I watch a game, and I can probably count on my two hands every time I’ve watched a sporting event and said, when either the play-by-play or color person said something, ‘Oh, I’d never actually thought about that.’
“Because I know sports, I’ve played sports my entire life. So when I watch someone like Greg and a handful of others, I come away going ‘Oh, I actually learned a little bit about the game.’ So that is my number-one [priority] when I go into every game now; I don’t have to force it, but if there’s something I see that I think I can add, I’m going to add.”
He’s been chasing that standard for a long time. Donovan started as an FS1 guest analyst in 2013 and as a studio analyst for ESPN’s 2014 World Cup coverage, with almost no idea whether he’d be any good at it, and by his own admission, he wasn’t.
“Candidly, when I first started, I had no idea if I would like it and no idea if I would be good at it,” he said in the same 2024 interview. “I enjoyed it, but I was terrible at it. And it’s just like anything — more practice, more repetition, more dedication to it, and you should get better. My ceiling was very high because I was at the very, very bottom.”
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For all the praise he has for Smoltz and Olsen, Donovan has had his share of critics along the way. Fox’s Euro 2024 coverage drew complaints from viewers who found his delivery low-key to a fault. It’s a criticism that has come and gone throughout his career, and one he’s clearly aware of.
Now, Donovan gets his biggest stage. He’ll call matches throughout the 2026 World Cup alongside longtime partner Ian Darke on Fox, with John Strong and Stu Holden serving as the lead team for the tournament. The eyes of the American soccer audience will be on Fox’s coverage in a way they haven’t been since 2022. If Donovan has gotten any closer to Smoltz and Olsen, this is when we find out.
The post Landon Donovan names John Smoltz, Greg Olsen as his two biggest broadcasting influences appeared first on Awful Announcing.
