Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has risked angering President Donald Trump after he said the team’s Super Bowl White House visit was ‘optional.’

After beating the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, the Eagles accepted an invite to visit the White House on April 28.

The team did not visit Trump at the White House in 2018 after winning the championship that year, as the administration un-invited them after it emerged the Eagles would only be sending a small group of players.

Now, Lurie has suggested once again that some Eagles could skip the visit. 

‘Our culture is that these are optional things,’ Lurie told reporters from the league’s annual meetings, per Pro Football Talk. ‘If you want to enjoy this, come along and we’ll have a great time and if you don’t, it is totally an optional thing.’

A White House official previously said that the team ‘enthusiastically accepted’ an invite to visit the historic site, and Lurie said the chance to see the White House was a ‘time honored tradition’ and that there was ‘no reticence’ from the team to accept the invite.

Jeffrey Lurie has said it is ‘optional’ for Eagles players to attend the White House visit

Trump previously rescinded the team’s White House visit in 2018 after it emerged only a small group of players was attending

Still, he said they were ‘not politicizing’ the invite in any way. 

‘To be celebrated at the White House is a good thing,’ Lurie continued. ‘There were special circumstances [in 2018] that were very different, and so this was kind of an obvious choice and look forward to it….

“When you grow up and you hear about, ‘Oh, the championship team got to go to the White House,’ that’s what this is. And so we didn’t have that opportunity and now we do. I think we’re all looking forward to it.”

The Eagles’ would-be White House visit in 2018 was set to come after Trump criticized NFL players who protested during the national anthem, which applied to several Eagles.

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The team indicated that only a small number of players were going to make the trip to DC and Trump then rescinded the invite.

This time around, it was initially rumored that the Eagles wouldn’t be making the trip, but they are set to visit Trump later this month, with the Ohio State football team visiting two weeks prior on April 14.

Eagles coach Nick Sirianni told reporters this week that he was ‘really excited’ for the trip. 

‘What an honor. What an honor to be able to go to the White House,’ he said, via Fox News.

‘Teams that have been able to win championships have been doing that for a long time, and I’m really honored to go and really excited to go.’