A Conversation With Kevin Egan, the Voice of ‘MLS 360’ | OneFootball

In an exclusive interview, we sit down with MLS broadcaster Kevin Egan to discuss his career path, American sports culture, and how his Irish accent has both propelled and roadblocked opportunities in media. 

With the 2026 MLS season now in full swing, there are quite a few Irishmen who will be looking to make their presence felt, including Austin FC’s Jon Gallagher, Colorado Rapids’ Connor Ronan, and New York City FC’s Kevin O’Toole. But perhaps the most important Irishman in the league will not be on the pitch, but in the Apple TV studio: Kevin Egan.

While Irish to his core, Egan’s journey started in Chicago, where his father Liam, a Gaelic footballer on an international tour, met his mother Kathy. They called the Windy City home for seven years before returning to Ireland, where Kevin was born in 1985.

Egan was a Gaelic footballer as well, but after tearing his ACL while playing for Raheny GAA, he went into the world of broadcasting.

After working as a runner for national broadcaster RTÉ Sport at the 2004 Summer Olympics, Egan rose through the ranks from researcher, to sub-editor and reporter, and covered competitions such as the FIFA World Cup, the Premier League, and the UEFA Champions League, before eventually deciding to move to Chicago in January 2009.

One week after making the move stateside, Egan walked into a café and cast his eyes on a barista as the song “Falling Slowly” by Irish artist Glen Hansard blared over the radio. She would go on to become his wife and the mother of his two children, accompanying him through three of the biggest cities in the United States.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Kevin Egan (@kev_egan)

While injury prevented Egan from following his father’s footsteps as a professional athlete, he was able to emulate him through falling in love in Chicago.

As far as his work career was concerned, however, Egan spent his first six months dealing with rejection, before finally being hired as a production assistant at the Big Ten Network, where he made graphics for live college football and basketball shows before offering to produce and present a weekly online soccer show on his own time.

“I couldn’t seem to get a break with the guy that was giving the opportunities back then to commentators,” Egan said in an exclusive Urban Pitch interview. “He pretty much told me, ‘I wouldn’t put your accent on the air.’ I remember being really upset, because it was just a storm at the moment in time: my best friend had just passed away in Ireland of a heart attack, and I’d just been back for the funeral. I thought I was getting a break to call a game, and he didn’t give it to me.

“We ended up having strong words in that moment with each other, but at least we were being honest.”

Consulting his wife Meg, who was still his girlfriend at the time, she told him, “‘You’re going to either go through him, go around him, or let him win. Which one is it going to be?”

Not wanting to bypass the studio’s chain of command and ruffle the feathers of his superiors, Egan decided to go around his coordinating producer, recruiting a team of like-minded friends to create the BTN Soccer Report, a 10-minute program they bootstrapped themselves.

“It was so poor, when I look back at how green I was, but I’m so grateful because I just kept going, and got better over time, and realized what it took to be a little bit better each and every week,” Egan said.

Surely enough, the Chicago Fire reached out to him with an offer to become their sideline reporter in 2012.

Bit by bit, Egan started to leave his footprint in sports media, working with industry giants like Fox Sports, ESPN, and Turner, covering competitions including the UEFA Champions League and various e-sport tournaments.

After six years in the Windy City, Egan headed southeast for Miami, where he worked as a nightly studio host for “The XTRA,” beIN Sports’ flagship daily show, in addition to hosting coverage of the world’s top leagues and the United States men’s national team.

Egan then made the move to Atlanta in 2019, where he remains today, and served as the play-by-play commentator and host for Atlanta United broadcasts on Fox Sports South. In 2021, Egan decided to launch a new career path in WWE where he went from working as a backstage reporter to presenting studio shows to co-hosting the WWE Kick-Off Shows under the name Kevin Patrick.

This would eventually materialize in Egan becoming the first-ever foreign voice to lead Raw from October 2022, before ascending to WWE Smackdown in 2023. After three years of balancing WWE with MLS, Egan decided to put all of his eggs in the MLS basket in order to focus on his job as the lead host of ‘MLS 360.’ Every weekend, he flies from Atlanta to New York to execute Apple TV’s whip-around coverage of the MLS match day. And while he’s enjoyed getting the chance to recharge his batteries and raise his children in the offseason, he’s more than ready to dip his feet into the water and get back to business.

We caught up with Egan for a Q&A session, where we discussed his career growth, American sports culture, and what it’s like being a foreign voice in distinctly American spaces.

Urban Pitch: After living in Chicago from 2009 to 2015, what has it been like starting new adventures in Miami and Atlanta?

Kevin Egan: The day after our wedding, I got word that I got the job at BeIN Sport just as we were away. That week, my wife packed up the apartment while I was calling two games in Montréal and Toronto, and then we moved to Miami for beIN sports, where I was thrust into the spotlight with Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1, and World Cup qualifiers. It was just absolutely amazing to be thrown into that world, working with someone who I call one of my best friends now, Kay Murray. We just had a ball for close to four years in Miami.

That was such a special time in our lives for my wife and I. We moved out of Miami in the summer of 2019, and I was working with with Atlanta United, calling their games at the time, and then I was doing some work with CNN International, covering the Champions League and doing stuff with them. Plus, we had just had a baby, we were in a high-rise apartment, it wasn’t conducive to quality parenting, so we said, “Let’s move to Atlanta, it’s a really family-friendly place…the suburbs here are amazing, let’s give life a go here for a while.” Sure enough, it’s six-and-a-half years now we’ve been here, and I absolutely love where we live.

There’s been some chatter about how Americans like to prioritize entertainment over pure sport, and we saw that recently in the World Cup draw. You have experience with the ultimate sports entertainment mashup in WWE. What are your thoughts on some of the elements creeping into the traditionally sacred space of soccer?

I’m a fan of always evolving, but I’m a fan of certain things staying traditional. For example, I’m not a fan of this hydration break, no matter what the temperature is. I do not like that: let the game flow, enjoy the game. It’s 45-plus minutes per half, take a break at half-time, but if we see a break in the middle of the first half, essentially introducing four quarters for sponsorship reasons in a dome in Atlanta or Dallas, that’s going to grind my gears. It feels absolutely needless. However, there are certain entertainment aspects to the game that I absolutely love.

The best new innovation for me is the ref cam. I don’t know how people don’t enjoy this. I’m looking at the footage released by Major League Soccer in the MLS Cup Playoffs, it’s an angle and a perspective of Lionel Messi that we’re not used to seeing. As Messi doesn’t speak that often, we’re left wanting for more. He’s such an anomaly. He’s a rare case of someone that is the global superstar, he’s arguably the most famous person on the planet, the most famous sports star on the planet, who really doesn’t speak very often. So when you get this unique angle of him coming up and talking to the ref, that’s the sort of stuff that I lack.

I don’t understand how people wouldn’t like that. That sort of an innovation for me is beyond cool. I don’t want to see it that often during the game, but the footage released afterwards is really cool.

I thought our director, Jim Daddona, and our producer, Brad Mertel, did it beautifully in MLS Cup. Every now and then, they’ll show it, and they have to protect the players, and that’s really important in all of this, because you don’t want a Roy Keane character going up to the ref and then he’s getting suspended because of something he said. I don’t think that’s fair. I think maybe you show it after the fact. They didn’t show a live ref cam at all in MLS Cup Final, but that’s the sort of innovation that I absolutely love.

Lastly, you’ve had to deal with a few chips on your shoulder, from being a foreigner with an Irish accent to not having an athletic career. Do you think this forced you to dig deeper and become a much better presenter?

Maybe, yeah. I think the accent thing is interesting, because it probably helped me in other ways. When you’re talking about the global game, it helps as much as it hinders you, if not more, so that’s definitely not an excuse.

It’s one of those things that just happened with that one producer at BTN. But I think when you’re coming through, you see guys like Brian Dunseth who had a professional career and was a U.S. Olympic captain, and I would meet him when I was doing Chicago Fire vs. Real Salt Lake games, and just try and be a sponge around people like him that are so good in the industry.

I think what it comes down to, if I was giving anyone just one piece of advice, it would be do the world-class basics. Be world class at the basics of shaking someone’s hand, remembering their name, remembering something about them, focusing on what they do well, and trying to replicate that, in a way, if you can. Just don’t be a dick. Be a good person. Ultimately, when you’re a good person, and you love the game, and you study the game, and you respect the game, you’ll get better over time, and those relationships and that knowledge will compound, and hopefully will put you in a better position down the road.