Soccer legend Landon Donovan has called out United Airlines after what he said was the “worst travel experience of my life.”
The former captain of the U.S. Men’s National Team is currently traveling across North America as an analyst and announcer for Fox Sports during the 2026 World Cup, but was met with trouble when his flight from Houston, Texas, to Newark, New Jersey, was delayed and instead routed to Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C.
“I’ve been traveling 100k miles/year since I was 16 and this was easily the worst travel experience of my life,” Donovan, 44, wrote on X. “No transparency, no clarity and no respect for the passengers who were treated horribly all evening/morning. Absolutely shameful from @united.”
His broadcast partner, Ian Darke, said on X said they were stranded at Dulles until Monday morning after a pilot refused to work overtime. He claimed that the airline did not offer any hotel vouchers to the passengers who were stranded.
Donovan added on X: “We were on the runway about to takeoff and the pilot was literally ONE minute past his time and decided to take us back to the gate at 3am.”
When the airline responded to Donovan’s post on X and asked him to take the conversation to a private message, he fired back that he was not interested.
“There will be no private DMs,” he said. “People want transparency and accountability so we’re going do this right here in public. You can start by apologizing to all impacted and then reimburse them all of their expenses with extra flight credit/money for the trouble caused.”
United did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment about the incident.
Donovan and Darke served as analysts when Germany beat out Curacao 7-1 Sunday and are expected to call the France-Senegal match Tuesday at 3 p.m. Eastern at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
The complaints come after Uruguay’s national team also faced flight chaos Monday on the eve of their first 2026 World Cup match as they traveled from their Mexico base to Miami.
The Uruguayan team was stuck at a hotel resort near Cancun for hours because their prepared plane did not have clearance to fly to the U.S. — which was not addressed until the last minute.
Fifa was initially blamed; however the organization put out a statement pointing the finger at the airline for the paperwork issue. The airline was not named.