From Kevin O’Toole to Connor Ronan to Jon Gallagher, there are a total of four players from the Republic of Ireland who are playing in Major League Soccer, with Andrew Moran becoming the 24th Irishman to play in MLS after making his debut on September 14, 2025. However, it is without a shadow of a doubt that the league’s most ubiquitous Irishman is none other than Kevin Egan.
Kevin is the son of Liam Egan, who, after enjoying a successful career in Gaelic football and winning back-to-back All-Irelands in 1976 and 1977, went to Chicago in 1977 for an international tour. It was here that he fell in love with a Chicago native named Kathy, with the two eventually getting hitched and heading back to the North Dublin community of Raheny, where they raised a son. Born on May 20, 1985, Kevin emulated his father by playing Gaelic football for Raheny GAA, but he was forced to abandon his playing dreams after tearing his ACL. Instead, Egan studied journalism at Griffith College Dublin and eventually got his breakthrough as a runner for national broadcaster RTÉ Sport at the 2004 Summer Olympics, soaring up the company ranks before eventually deciding to leave his hometown and start a new life in Chicago.
“I think when you’re young, youth is a great barrier to both anxiety and uncertainty. You can dive in and give something a go with the hope that when you back yourself, you’ll come good. I didn’t know that it would work out, but I figured it would,” stated Egan in an exclusive World Soccer Talk interview. “I went to Chicago with this kind of blind optimism that things will fall into place, and the Irish way of thinking, ‘It’ll be grand, we’ll figure it out.’ There’s very much an Irish mindset of ‘Don’t worry about planning it, it’ll figure itself out.’ When I think about what I tried to do, I don’t think that’s something that I could do with kids, and with a family, and with a mortgage, and all these things I have now in life that I’m lucky to have. I don’t think you could give stuff like that a rattle anymore, unless you were absolutely desperate. But it’s worked out so far, and I’m so grateful that it did.”
Although Kevin wasn’t able to follow his father’s path of becoming a professional Gaelic footballer, he did replicate his feat of moving to Chicago and finding love; one week after moving to the Windy City, Egan came across a barista in a café, locking eyes just as the Irish song “Falling Slowly” by Glen Hansard was playing. 16 years later, the two are married and have two children. But whilst it took him just a few days to encounter the woman of his dreams, finding the job of his dreams proved far more difficult. After six months of suffering rejection after rejection, Egan was finally hired as a Production Assistant at the Big Ten Network, where he made graphics for live college football and basketball shows. But similarly to others like Neto Borges, Egan always knew that soccer was his one true love over all of the other sports. It’s why he offered to produce and present a weekly online soccer show on his own time for Big Ten, eventually grabbing the attention of MLS side Chicago Fire, who hired him as a sideline reporter in 2012.
Egan wasn’t just able to travel across the USA and Canada and follow the Fire’s trajectory—he also managed to parlay that into other gigs with 120 Sports (now Stadium), Fox Sports, and ESPN, hosting global FIFA tournaments from Turner Sports’ ELEAGUE studio and eMLS events across the US in addition to analyzing Champions League games on CNN World Sport and anchoring Turner Sports and B/R Football’s exclusive broadcasts of the UEFA Champions League. In 2015, he headed for Miami after accepting a full-time position with beIN SPORTS as a studio presenter and match commentator. At the time, beIN were the hottest soccer network in the USA, boasting competitions like LaLiga and Serie A, with Egan hosting live El Clásico coverage from Madrid and Barcelona as well as covering the U.S. Men’s National Team’s World Cup qualifying failure in 2017.
“We had La Liga and Serie A, we had great characters coming through, like Bobo Vieri, Juan Pablo Ángel, Diego Forlán…I was instantly thrust into this spotlight where, at the beginning, I was nearly used as an analyst, which I didn’t really like. I remember feeling this huge sense of imposter syndrome. I was on a desk with Ángel, Ruud Gullit, Gary Bailey, a longtime Manchester United goalkeeper, and I’m being asked questions. I thought, ‘No, this needs to change. I need to become the host, because it’s just not fair on the viewer to be asking me questions. I’ve never lived this life that they’ve lived, so I want to be the host going forward, I want to make sure I’m the guy that’s the play-by-play guy, rather than the analyst, because I think I’ll be better off asking the questions.”
Egan departed Miami for Atlanta in 2019, where he worked as the play-by-play commentator and host for Atlanta United broadcasts on FOX Sports South. Two years later, Egan started working for WWE under the name Kevin Patrick, going from backstage reporter to studio presenter to co-host of the WWE Kick-Off Shows to the first-ever foreign voice to lead Raw from October 2022, before eventually ascending to WWE Smackdown in 2023. After balancing WWE Smackdown coverage with his work as a play-by-play commentator for Apple TV+’s inaugural season of MLS coverage, Egan left WWE in order to focus on his role as the host of ‘MLS 360.’ Every week, Egan flies from Atlanta to New York and hosts a 4-hour live “whip-around” show from Apple TV’s studios in Manhattan alongside guests like Dax McCarty, Kaylyn Kyle, Sacha Kljestan and Bradley Wright-Phillips, which is essentially MLS’ answer to NFL Red Zone.
“It’s a dream job…there have been times in different jobs, for example, with WWE, where it reached that stage where I didn’t want to go to work, I just didn’t enjoy it, and I wanted to enjoy my job. It’s never a feeling I had with beIN Sports or Apple TV; I love going to work now, and I’ve formed such a good friendship with Dax, Sacha, Kaylyn and Bradley on the desk. We have such a laugh each and every week. We love the league, and we want to see the league grow as much as possible. To be around those guys, playing pickleball on a Saturday afternoon before we head in and go on the air together, it’s great. We can do Countdown 360 and wrap up in the same day, we can play pickleball on a Saturday afternoon, and then we go on air for about 8-9 hours together each. We’re on air for a countdown 360, wrap-up on a Saturday….it’s a manic time, but we all love MLS, and we’re all bullish on the trajectory of the league.”
