Chicago Fire announcer suggests Philadelphia Union players deserve to get ‘clocked’

The Philadelphia Union finished atop the Eastern Conference and made easy work of the Chicago Fire during a best-of-three series in the first round of MLS Cup Playoffs. No one is disputing the Union are the team to beat in the East. But during Game 2 of the Union’s series against the Fire on Saturday, one of the Fire’s radio announcers wasn’t exactly pleased with how the Union go about winning.

In fact, Max Thoma, the play-by-play voice of the Fire, went so far as to suggest a player might throw ’em up in response to some of the Union’s shenanigans. During the second half of Saturday’s Game 2, a Union player briefly went down and the team signaled for the training staff to come on to address a potential head injury. The Union player got up quickly, before the training staff made it to the field, and indicated he was okay. However, the player went back down once he realized the training staff was called, eating valuable clock as the Union held a 3-0 lead.

“Philadelphia Union has been the best team in Major League Soccer this year, but you watch them play and you would imagine that a team they will face in the playoffs in the future, if it is not tonight, will come out and just try and punch them in the face in a literal sense, because this is a team, there’s a lot of bush league activity that goes on between whistles, after whistles,” Thoma said. “It’s a matter of time before one of these guys gets clocked, and it might be deservedly so.”

Outside of hockey, where fights are literally part of the sport, it’s pretty rare for a broadcaster to suggest that physical violence could be imminent based on a team’s behavior. It’s especially uncommon for a broadcaster to do so in the fashion that Thomas did. Typically, when an announcer talks about behavior that might result in retaliation on the field, it’s the analyst who has played the game before saying it, not the play-by-play commentator.

To make matters worse, Thoma had a pretty brutal hot mic moment earlier in the game.

Update: In the original publication of this article, we misidentified the announcer who made certain on-air comments. It was Max Thoma, not Max Anderson. Max Anderson is the backup announcer. We regret this error.