Ed Sheeran’s audience is going to be mackling a whole lot less thanks to the machinations of some nasty stadium owners (and the spinelessness of Sheeran himself). The rapper Macklemore has been dropped as the opener for Sheeran’s The Loop Tour after he used part of his set to speak out against the genocide in Gaza and to call for a “Free Palestine”—as if that’s not exactly what you’d expect Macklemore to do.
Wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial. pic.twitter.com/BOJ9xMoIZn
— Macklemore (@macklemore) September 7, 2026
The fallout from the comments was swift (and involved a 10-post crash-out from Pink, for some reason). Within a week, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who also owns Gillette Stadium, “rallied” stadium owners to ban Macklemore from playing at their venues. How do we know this? Because Macklemore told us himself—in a 12-slide Instagram post skewering the stadium owners, doubling down on his stance on Gaza, and making his “friend” Ed look like a little twerp.
“Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him,” Macklemore wrote. “We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft has rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”
And if you’re wondering whether or not Macklemore may have exaggerated, he didn’t. Kraft himself issued a statement of his own following the Macklemore post, confirming that he’d issued the ban, calling Macklemore’s “recent actions” as “deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.”
AT&T Stadium reportedly is one of the venues that opposed Macklemore being on Ed Sheeran’s bill. Worth noting that AT&T is hosting Kanye West in November.
— gwen howerton (@kissphoria.bsky.social) September 14, 2026 at 1:34 PM
Macklemore addressed allegations of antisemitism directly in his original speech and in his post, writing, “When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism, or saying ‘Free Palestine’ gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.”
But what of Ed? While Macklemore takes great pains to describe him as a “friend” and “brother” who has an “infectious magic about him,” he also does not hide the fact that Sheeran was unwilling to sacrifice his “apolitical” image for his friend. “[Ed] told me that the order ‘Free Palestine’ and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with,” Macklemore wrote. “I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public-facing, ‘I don’t take sides.’”
Damn. My condolences to Sheeran’s last remaining ounce of cultural cache. We’ll never forget that time you played yourself in Yesterday or how good hearing “Shape of You” for the first time made us feel.
As for Macklemore, he leaves us with this:
“I didn’t need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.Free Palestine.
But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I’ve ever been on.”
Somewhere out there, Pink is scrambling to find the perfect cat-drinking-wine meme in response.
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