Why are Saddam Hussein edits taking over sports TikTok?

Deep in the crevices of sports TikTok, hiding in a spider hole, is a new trend that you’ve perhaps come across. Thinking back on heartbreaking games of the past, have you ever thought, “Wow, that guy absolutely terrorized my team”?

With both the NFL and English Premier League back in action, fans are dredging up painful memories of players who have ruined their weekends time and again. This genre of meme has an unofficial name — “football terrorist” — and it’s being made literal in the kind of darkly absurd memes only TikTok could deliver.

These SportsTok edits splice together lowlight reels of those players with clips of former Iraqi president and dictator Saddam Hussein.

Yes, this is very real. The edits don’t just splice in Saddam clips — they’re also set to a nasheed called “Al Qawlu Qawlu Sawarim” by Abu Ali, released back in 2000. Nasheeds are traditional Islamic a cappella-style chants, and this one, based on translations, was meant as a battle hymn. Sports TikTok has reimagined it as the soundtrack to your team’s worst nightmares.

The “football terrorist” label generally falls into two buckets. First are the athletes or teams who inflict pain through sheer incompetence — think Eli Apple getting burned in coverage, Andre Onana gifting goals at Manchester United, or the eternal misery of Cleveland Browns fans. Then there are the players so dominant against certain opponents that they might as well own them: Aaron Rodgers torching the Bears, Tom Brady steamrolling the AFC East for two decades, or the entirety of Alabama college football from 2008-2023.

And this isn’t just football. The NBA got its own taste during the 2024 playoffs when Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers went on a Cinderella run powered by comeback wins and last-second daggers. NBA Twitter christened him “The Haliban,” complete with inappropriate memes with a turban photoshopped onto his head. Even coaches aren’t immune — Baltimore Ravens’ John Harbaugh was meme’d into Osama Bin Laden after coughing up a 34–19 lead against the Bills on Sunday Night Football.

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Given that we’re nearly 24 years removed from the start of the U.S.’s so-called “War on Terror,” it’s not exactly shocking that its cast of characters — Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, even George W. Bush — have drifted into the surreal meme-space of sports TikTok. What was once deadly serious geopolitical imagery has, in certain corners of fandom, been reworked into gallows humor.

It also speaks to how the culture of the early 2000s, when Islamophobia was normalized (and often played for laughs in mainstream media), has curdled into something stranger amid our Y2K cultural revival. For younger fans who didn’t live through the 9/11 era, the imagery feels like a detached artifact rather than real history. Thus, remixing it into a meme about a placekicker ruining your Sunday or a striker blowing an easy save. It’s absurd, offensive, and — depending on who you ask — really, really funny.

Case in point, one comment under a Tom Brady X Saddam edit reads, “As a kid growing up in NY during the 2000s, these two were considered equally evil men back then.”