By: Zach Lowy
When Michael Lahoud was born in Freetown on September 15, 1986, Sierra Leone was rapidly devolving into a failed state. Decades of political corruption, electoral violence, and growing economic inequality had taken their toll on the country. When the government could no longer afford to pay schoolteachers, the public education system collapsed. Apart from a select few families like Lahoud’s, who could afford private tutors, the vast majority of Sierra Leone’s children spent the late ‘80s aimlessly roaming the streets.
Many of these children would go on to join the rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). And in 1991, with the support of the special forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, they attempted to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone President Joseph Momoh.
Over the next 11 years, a bloody civil war wreaked havoc on the tiny West African nation, resulting in 50,000-70,000 casualties and 2.5 million displaced. Nearly half of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and a quarter of the Sierra Leone government’s armed forces consisted of children aged 8–14 years old. After conscripting their young soldiers, they proceeded to get them addicted to drugs like heroin, cannabis, cocaine or palm wine; with needles in short supply, they’d often cut open a flap of skin and inject the drug directly into the bloodstream.
If they were under the influence, perhaps they might feel a little less guilty about murdering an innocent human being or continuing to fight after watching their friend get gunned down. With a devastating mix of drugs clouding their mindset, these child soldiers had no qualms whatsoever about extorting civilians for money and food at gunpoint, chopping off limbs, killing their own family members, and raping and mutilating fellow children.
Michael Lahoud could have been one of these child soldiers, had it not been for a little bit of luck.
“What I now know about the war, I would have been ripe for picking to become a child soldier,” stated Lahoud in an exclusive RG interview. “Imagine being six years old, rounded up, drugged with heroin, and then recruited to be a child soldier and go around killing thousands of people. There was a sense of anxiety amongst my grandparents, who started to tell me to never go past the mailbox or else the boogeyman is going to get you. The boogeyman was a rebel commander who was capturing kids who were my age and turning them into child soldiers, or killing them if they refused. I won the biggest lottery that life can give you, which is missing out on absolute terror. Had I not left when I did, I don’t think I would be alive today to do this interview.”
Making the Move to The USA
His grandparents had done their best to shield him from Sierra Leone’s increasingly violent predicament, allowing him to focus on school and soccer, but suddenly, they had no other choice but to evacuate him from the premises. One day, in the summer of 1993, his grandmother burst into his classroom, grabbed him by the arm, and sprinted two miles back to his house, where he found his relatives hurriedly packing his suitcase. Michael asked his great-grandmother what the commotion was about, who assured him that he was just going on vacation to America. The reality: he was the sole person in his village to win an emergency VISA after his family entered him in a lottery competition.
His uncle drove to the port outside of Freetown, where a throng of government soldiers kept guard with machine guns and bazookas and aggressively pushed him away from the ferry after he failed to provide a VISA for himself. He then picked his nephew up and handed him across the crowd to a soldier who was on the boat. At six years of age, Lahoud was going to be flying on an airplane for the very first time, all by himself. He flew to Paris before boarding another flight to Washington D.C., where he met his parents, who had departed Sierra Leone when he was just three years old.
As an immigrant growing up in Northern Virginia, Lahoud quickly latched onto soccer as a way to make friends and cultivate his identity. Eventually, these skills earned him a scholarship at Wake Forest University, where he helped them win their only NCAA National Championship in 2007 and reach the Final Four in 2006 and 2008.
Balancing his time between collegiate athletics, academic studies, and playing for USL Premier Development League side Carolina Dynamo, Lahoud left an indelible legacy with the Demon Deacons and ranks joint-second in school history for most appearances (95) and fourth for most starts (89).
“I’ve always had a true love for soccer…if you have a ball, if you have a goal, you understand the game of soccer. Because there was an influx of immigrants moving to the DC area at the time, that’s how I made friends. Soccer allowed me to speak to other people in ways that I couldn’t because I was still learning English and trying to assimilate into a different culture; it was a godsend. For a young child who escaped civil war moving to a country thousands of miles away, I think soccer truly saved my life.”
Plying His Trade in MLS, NASL, And USL
After establishing himself as one of the premier players in collegiate soccer, Lahoud was selected with the ninth overall pick of the 2009 MLS SuperDraft by now-defunct side Chivas USA. Lahoud packed his bags for Los Angeles, where he amassed 5 goals and 6 assists in 74 appearances, before being traded to the Philadelphia Union in 2012. He quickly made a name for himself in the City of Brotherly Love, playing 27 times in his debut campaign, only to see his minutes dwindle in his sophomore campaign and make just nine appearances. The highlight of 2013 would come not at the club level, but the international level, as Lahoud returned to his hometown for the first time in 20 years and made his international debut for Sierra Leone in a 3-2 World Cup qualifying win.
“It was a full-circle moment…it was this sense of healing that I didn’t know I needed. Every child grows up wondering: ‘Who am I? Who do I belong to? Where do I come from?’ I couldn’t answer the last two: I knew what it meant to be Sierra Leonean-American, but I didn’t know what it meant to be Sierra Leonean. I identified more as American for the longest time, so to go back and represent my country, it brought a lot of pride to me and my family. To be with two of the last people I saw in Sierra Leone – my uncle and grandma – meant everything to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but my grandma was dying, and it was the last time I was able to see her. I asked her right before I made my debut vs. Equatorial Guinea in Freetown, ‘What it was like for her to see me leave for America?’ She said, ‘After all these years, my one wish was that I would go and make something of myself.”
Lahoud played 65 times for the Union before making the move to NASL side New York Cosmos on a season-long loan. He would last just four months in the Big Apple before fellow NASL outfit Miami FC bought out his contract, where he established himself as a vital cog in midfield before bouncing around from USL Championship sides FC Cincinnati (now in MLS) and San Antonio FC. Lahoud hung up his boots in 2019 after meeting his girlfriend (now wife), but remained in touch with soccer as an assistant coach for the San Antonio-based Trinity Tigers’ college soccer team in 2021/22, before deciding that his future was not in coaching, but broadcasting.
He worked as a color analyst for Austin FC between 2021 and 2023, working alongside veteran broadcaster Adrian Healey, serving as the voice for a team that was taking its very first steps in Major League Soccer. He also enjoyed freelance gigs with ESPN’s ACC Network and Longhorn Network, as well as CBS Sports Golazo Network, before eventually leaving Texas for Connecticut and joining Paramount on a permanent gig in October 2023 as an analyst for the nightly news and highlights show SCORELINE and additional CBS Network studio shows like MORNING FOOTY and BOX 2 BOX.
“If you’d have told me that I would be able to do this job when I started, I would have said ‘you’re crazy,’ especially going into the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It’s my dream job. Every day, I wake up, go in for work, try not to take anything for granted, and try to bring the same love for the game and passion for the game that I have. We could be talking about Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan, my goal is to try and bring the same sense of knowledge to those teams as I do with the UEFA Champions League, leading with a love for the game and educating fans in this country. Here at the Golazo Network, we’re fighting this reputation that Americans know nothing about soccer, so every day, I walk into work and try to prove that I know what I’m talking about, that I have an educated opinion.”
Giving Back to Sierra Leone
As he celebrates 39 years of life, Michael Lahoud has already left an ineffaceable legacy in several different areas, from Fairfax, Virginia, where he won the Washington Post All-Met Player of 2005 for his performances with Wilbert Tucker Woodson High School, to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he led Wake Forest to a national championship. Today, he’s laying his footprints in Connecticut as a soccer analyst for CBS as well as a father to a one-month-old daughter. But rather than sticking to sports, he’s actively utilized his platform to make a positive difference in society, be that winning the MLS W.O.R.K.S. Humanitarian of August 2010 for his efforts with HIV prevention through The Wall Memorias Project, or volunteering as a mentor with the Compton United Soccer Club, or posing for the NOH8 campaign to raise awareness for gay rights.
And whilst he only played four times for the Leone Stars, it’s fair to say that he’s made his mark in Sierra Leone. Back in 2010, when Lahoud was stepping off a bus in Seattle, a stranger approached him just as he was about to enter the Chivas team hotel and told him about her organization Schools for Salone, a charity dedicated to improving the decimated education system in Sierra Leone. Lahoud decided to help raise funds for the organization as well as collaborate with fellow MLS player Kei Kamara – who fled the Sierra Leone Civil War as a teenager – to build their own school.
Returning to Sierra Leone after two decades and finding a country torn asunder only heightened Lahoud’s ambitions to raise funds for the project and get it off the ground in order to provide a high-quality education to thousands of disadvantaged children. Classes began on September 7, 2015, in the Kei Kamara/Mike Lahoud Education for All Primary School in Allen Town, East End Freetown, where countless war victims fled to get their lives back on track. As recognition for their efforts, Kamara and Lahoud won the 2015 Merit Award, an annual award that has been presented by the global players’ union FIFPro since 2008 to honor players who make significant contributions to society and player welfare, and a $25,000 prize.
“I grew up in a household where my parents and my grandparents gave weary people a safe place to rest…I grew up sharing meals with people I didn’t know, because my parents opened the door to make people feel welcome. I always felt this sense of gratitude to the people in my life who opened their doors for a young kid from West Africa to make me feel welcome, and I never forgot that. My college coach and a lot of my mentors made me promise that I would be committed to something bigger than myself, outside of what I did on the field. There was always this fire in me to do something for the people of Sierra Leone; I wanted to give back to someone else, because at the end of the day, the most important commodity that we have In our life is time. And who we choose to give our time to truly matters, so I’ve often chosen to give my time to others.”
“I’m proud to say that I love this game, but one of the things I’m most proud of is I got an education. We built this school to impact the next generation of Sierra Leoneans, to ensure that they get the best education, and to help rebuild something that was taken away from us. My family is really excited to continue that work and figure out how we can leave that legacy, which starts by going there for the first time as a family. I want my daughter to know that she is an American, but that she is a proud Sierra Leonean as well.”
Source: “I Don’t Think I’d Be Alive”: Lahoud on Journey From Sierra Leone to US