Gregg Berhalter regrets it all.
If he were to do it over again, the U.S. men’s soccer national team coach said Thursday he would have never told a story about an unnamed player—later revealed to be Gio Reyna—revealing how nearly sent the young star home from the World Cup for having a bad attitude.
Those comments laid the foundation for a dizzying week of drama roiling the program, which included a shock domestic assault admission by the coach, prompted by an alleged blackmailing from Reyna’s parents—who also happen to be his longtime friends—which resulted in his replacement taking the helm.
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Berhalter finally broke his silence on the chaos Thursday during an online event hosted by the Harvard Business Review.
“If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have told that story,” Berhalter said. “It just brought too much unwarranted attention to an overall shining example of team culture and teamwork. And so that would be something that I would go back and change, for sure.”
On Dec. 6, just three days after the U.S. was knocked out of the World Cup in Qatar, Berhalter said at a leadership conference: “We had a player that was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field [at the World Cup]. One of 26 players, so it stood out. As a staff, we sat together for hours deliberating what we were going to do with this player. We were ready to book a plane ticket home. That’s how extreme it was.”
The player was quickly revealed to be Reyna—a 20-year-old who’d barely featured in the tournament despite being widely recognized as one of the country’s rising stars. Reyna responded to Berhalter’s comments calmly and concisely in a statement, questioning why the coach would air out his own locker room’s dirty laundry.
While Reyna’s statement appeared to end the awkward saga, more drama was already brewing behind the scenes.
Reyna’s parents—who were longtime friends with Berhalter and his wife, Rosalind—didn’t appreciate their son being thrown under the bus—so his mom phoned executives at U.S. Soccer to tell them about a violent piece of Berhalter’s past.
Danielle Reyna said Wednesday she called the federation to tell them that Berhalter once assaulted Rosalind, then his girlfriend, in 1991 when they were college freshmen at the University of North Carolina.
Danielle’s admission came a day after Berhalter announced the incident himself—an apparent attempt to get ahead of the story leaking from elsewhere. Berhalter claimed an enemy was using his private past to blackmail him and “take me down.”
Danielle denied this Wednesday, saying she simply wanted those in charge at U.S. Soccer to know their coach was a hypocrite for skewering their son when he did something much worse at the same age.
“I wanted to let him know that I was absolutely outraged and devastated that Gio had been put in such a terrible position, and that I felt very personally betrayed by the actions of someone my family had considered a friend for decades,” Danielle said in a statement.
Danielle’s husband, Claudio, was a longtime teammate of Berhalter in high school, college and on the national team, as well as the best man at Berhalter’s wedding. He released a statement standing behind his wife’s comments, saying he was equally upset with how Berhalter admonished his son after the World Cup.
Berhalter, when asked his feelings on the rift between him and his old best friends, said Thursday he hates the situation the most because of the pain it brought his wife.
“The worst part of it for me is, my heart aches for my wife, because it was her story to tell, if she chose to or not,” Berhalter said. “And that’s what just really, really saddens me.”
Berhalter said he hopes the weirdness of the past week doesn’t impact his relationship with players on the national team.
“Trust is something that takes a long time to build, but can go away really quickly,” Berhalter said Thursday. “You have to be consistent with who you are and you have to have clear values, and if you are, people can see that and they can trust that consistency is there. … My bond with the players is very strong and it’s about maintaining that bond.”
Despite a week of drama that would rival even the messiest reality TV saga, Berhalter says he’d love to continue coaching the national team through the next World Cup, which will be hosted in North America. His current contract to lead the team expired on New Year’s Day.
U.S. Soccer has said little about this ordeal. The federation released a statement Tuesday saying it’d investigate the alleged blackmailers and Berhalter for the assault incident, then announced Berhalter’s temporary replacement—assistant coach Anthony Hudson—the next day.
“Of course, I’d like to continue in my role,” Berhalter said. “When we started in 2018, we wanted to change the way the world views American soccer. When you ask around the world now about our team, the world sees us in a completely different light. But now it’s about taking that next step.”
