How a former Philly community newspaper editor became an agent of change in global soccer

Alexandra “Lex” Chalat wasn’t yet known by the soccer world when she worked at the Southwest Globe Times, a community newspaper in Southwest Philadelphia, nearly two decades ago.

Or when, after a year there, she went across town to the South Philly Review. Or certainly earlier, when she was a gymnast at Penn and a writer for the student newspaper’s culture magazine.

But people who knew her back then might have guessed that something in the Colorado native’s spirit would carry her across the globe. Their hunch was right.

After her newspaper years, Chalat began a journey through a series of sports-related community engagement groups. She spent the most time at Beyond Sport, where she was the head of social innovation and later executive director, and a consulting group connected to the company, where she was managing director for seven years.

That opened the door for one of the biggest jobs in the world: manager and later director of the Qatar Foundation’s 2022 men’s World Cup legacy program. And last year, she moved back to the United States to become executive director of U.S. Soccer’s 2026 World Cup legacy initiative, called Soccer Forward.

Now based in New York, she has come as close to a full circle as she ever has. And she has definitely not forgotten the roots she planted while living in Philadelphia.

“I started really seeing firsthand how, in communities, community leaders and changing communities and really the heroes of the communities were always connected to sports, or arts, or something like that,” Chalat said. “I started really wanting to be part of that, and wanting to understand it more. What’s the systemic reason? Why?”

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Her curiosity led her to the London School of Economics in 2007 to pursue a master’s degree. That year, the city won the bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. A year later, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched Beyond Sport, and Chalat badgered the staff into giving her an internship.

From there, as a gymnast might say, she stuck the landing.

“Through that lens, for 13 years, [I] lived and worked in 30 countries, supported organizations in over 100 countries that use sport at the grassroots community level to address every social issue you could imagine,” she said. “Financial literacy, HIV and AIDS, female health, conflict resolution, religious equity, etc.”

Chalat’s travels included tenures in South Africa and Brazil, where the men’s World Cups were hosted in 2010 and 2014, respectively, and worked with Qatar from afar in 2020.

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When she moved to Qatar in 2021, she knew what she was getting into. The country had already been accused of a range of human rights abuses for years, from restrictive labor laws to limits on women’s rights and a ban on same-sex marriage.

But she saw an opportunity to potentially make some change, especially when it came to getting more girls and women involved in playing sports.

“I care about this stuff, and I believe that World Cups can make a change like that and make an impact,” Chalat said.

Among the tangible outcomes of her work was converting the Education City stadium in Al Rayyan (a suburb of Doha, Qatar’s main city) into a dedicated facility for female athletes of all ages. Chalat said it now hosts 10,000 people a week.

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It wasn’t always easy to grow women’s sports in Qatar’s historically male-centric culture, and it certainly wasn’t easy to navigate the criticism Chalat got from elsewhere. Nor would some people want to speak openly about all that afterward. But Chalat was.

“What I learned there, what I learned in my entire career working in communities all over the world, is that we have a very specific perception of what equality means,” she said. “What women and girls should be able to do, what that participation is. As a white, western, Jewish woman, I have a view on that.”

There are fewer people in Qatar than there are in the United States and England. Yet Chalat said she found plenty of women there who care about growing participation in women’s sports. They just wanted to participate on their terms, such as wearing traditional Muslim head coverings while playing.

“They very much care about sports there as women,” she said, noting the number of women she worked with at the foundation, up to its CEO. “But what I would say is that they have their values, they have their culture, so how can we improve and increase the opportunity for women and girls to play there that won’t sacrifice their culture? … It wasn’t about convincing them, it was about supporting them in the way that made sense for their culture, so that they didn’t feel like they were being appropriated or put upon.”

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There were many critics of Qatar — and her, personally. Handling them wasn’t always easy, but she was resolute.

“Should you work in parts of the world that might not have the same belief or value systems as you?” she said. “Where I’ve gone to over the years with all this stuff is that nothing ever came from ignoring an issue, ignoring a challenge. … I was like, look, if they are open to seeing what this can do for their region, for the country, for the world, let’s do this. And I went, and they were.”

Chalat had talked with a lot of friends and colleagues in the U.S. before deciding to take up that challenge. Her words might not be what Qatar’s critics would like to hear — and there are still many critics of the country’s lack of broader change. FIFA has also been accused of not caring anymore about holding the country to promises of labor reforms. But she did not whitewash her reflections.

“There were ups and downs while I was there. I never felt excluded. I never felt discriminated against,” she said. “For me, it was how am I supporting you in your context and your challenges, and how is sport able to do that. And they get that.”

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She is convinced that the World Cup opened up opportunities for Qatari women and girls to participate more in sports, and that their doing so can lead to societal changes overall. But she also knows the critics have not gone away.

“I’m not sitting here and saying Qatar is amazing [and] they get everything right, but I would never sit here in the U.S. and say that either,” Chalat said. “What I’m saying is that there is a positive trajectory, there was an opportunity, and we worked on it. That’s a good thing. That’s something that soccer can do.”

When U.S. Soccer started seeking a leader for Soccer Forward last summer, Chalat was back in the U.S. on leave. One of her friends sent her the job posting, then several others did, and she decided to look into it. As she did, she also realized that she had done enough in Qatar to feel comfortable stepping aside.

“I loved my time in Qatar, and it was incredible, and it was challenging, and it was meaningful for me,” she said. “I was like, so I’ve done this for Qatar, I’m not going to come back to my home country and help them do that? Like, I have to do that. ... And I feel like it’s even more important now.”

The scale is different, and the politics certainly are different — and as Chalat alluded to, both are challenges. But after so many years abroad, the idea of making an impact in the world’s game in her native country was one she wouldn’t pass up.

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“It’s very different from any other World Cup ever, with all of the cities doing their own thing, which is important,” she said. “For me, it’s how are we helping them, and how are we unifying this so that we’re making an impact as a country? And what does this mean for the sport of soccer in the country? Who do we want to be when it comes to soccer?”

Finding the answers might take her to a lot more places over the next year. And she’ll be quite happy if Philadelphia is one of them.

“My heart is always, and has always still been, with Philly,” she said. “I use everything I learned in South Philly. Literally every day, I think about it.”