Landon Donovan blasts airline after World Cup travel fiasco

United States men's national team legend and Fox World Cup analyst Landon Donovan is in an online spat with United Airlines after travel difficulties influenced him and his broadcast partner Ian Darke to complete the last 250 miles of their journey from Houston to Northern New Jersey in an Uber.

According to their posts on X (formerly Twitter), Donovan and Darke were among those booked for flight 404 from Houston to Newark, N.J., on Sunday evening.

Severe weather diverted the flight to Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., landing at 1:10 a.m. ET, according to data from the website FlightAware.

The wait to reboard proved long enough that Darke, Donovan and their statistician eventually hired a car to complete the trip instead, with Darke posting the clip of their arrival in New Jersey to his X account shortly before 9 a.m. ET Monday morning.

Flight 404 eventually took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. ET and landed exactly two hours later. That was 11 hours and 11 minutes later than initially scheduled.

Darke posted on X that passengers on their flight would "think twice about using that airline again." Donovan shared Darke's post with additional comments.

"I've been traveling 100k miles/year since I was 16 and this was easily the worst travel experience of my life," he wrote. "No transparency, no clarity and no respect for the passengers who were treated horribly all evening/morning. Absolutely shameful from (United)."

When United's account replied apologizing for the travel difficulties and asking for Donovan to send a direct message with his confirmation number, Donovan responded in a quote post.

"There will be no private DMs," Donovan wrote. "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."

Darke and Donovan called Mexico-South Africa to open the tournament in Mexico City on Thursday and Germany-Curacao in Houston on Sunday. They will call Tuesday's match between France and Senegal from East Rutherford, N.J.

An email to United Airlines' general media relations address was not immediately returned.

Donovan is the joint all-time leading goal scorer in USMNT history and the author of the team's most iconic World Cup moment, a stoppage-time winner against Algeria in the 2010 tournament that secured the Americans' place in the knockout phase.

He began broadcasting before his retirement as an analyst for ESPN's 2014 World Cup coverage after he was surprisingly left off of manager Jurgen Klinsmann's United States roster. This is his second World Cup working with Fox after he was also a color analyst during the 2022 tournament.

Darke was famously on the call for Donovan's 2010 match-winner for ESPN. More known in England for his work on Sky and TNT, Darke is in his second major tournament for Fox after calling games at the 2024 European Championships.

--Ian Nicholas Quillen, Field Level Media