Gio Reyna took to social media Monday to tell his side of the story concerning his limited participation for the U.S. men’s national team at the World Cup.
Reyna said coverage of the story U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter told at a leadership conference included “highly fictionalized versions of events,” seeming to push back at the notion that the coaching staff was deliberating whether to send Reyna home early from Qatar over a lack of effort in training.
Reports leaked that Berhalter commented on a World Cup personnel matter during a private conference in New York last Tuesday. While Berhalter did not name the player, multiple outlets confirmed the story was about Reyna.
“Just before the World Cup, Coach Berhalter told me that my role at the tournament would be very limited,” Reyna wrote on Instagram Monday. “I was devastated. … I fully expected and desperately wanted to contribute to the play of a talented group as we tried to make a statement at the World Cup.
“I am also a very emotional person, and I fully acknowledge that I let my emotions get the best of me and affect my training and behavior for a few days after learning about my limited role. I apologized to my teammates and coach for this, and I was told I was forgiven. Thereafter, I shook off my disappointment and gave everything I had on and off the field.
“I am disappointed that there is continuing coverage of this matter (as well as some highly fictionalized versions of events) and extremely surprised that anyone on the U.S. men’s team staff would contribute to it. Coach Berhalter has always said that issues that arise with the team will stay ‘in house’ so we can focus on team unity and progress.”
Reyna’s lack of playing time became a predominant theme of coverage of the Americans as they advanced from the group stage and lost in the Round of 16 to the Netherlands. Reyna, a talented attacking midfielder and the son of two U.S. international soccer veterans, never started a match but played the entire second half of the Netherlands loss.
Asked about Reyna’s lack of playing time at one point, Berhalter mentioned Reyna was dealing with “some tightness,” and Reyna pushed back, saying he was 100 percent fit.
U.S. Soccer has said that Berhalter’s remarks were supposed to be off the record, but they were published in a newsletter by Charter and then confirmed by other outlets.
“In this last World Cup, we had a player that was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field,” Berhalter reportedly said. “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. And what it came down to was, we’re going to have one more conversation with him, and part of the conversation was how we’re going to behave from here out. There aren’t going to be any more infractions.
“But the other thing we said to him was, you’re going to have to apologize to the group, but it’s going to have to say why you’re apologizing. It’s going to have to go deeper than just, ‘Guys, I’m sorry.’ And I prepped the leadership group with this. I said, ‘OK, this guy is going to apologize to you as a group, to the whole team.’ And what was fantastic in this whole thing is that after he apologized, they stood up one by one and said, ‘Listen, it hasn’t been good enough. You haven’t been meeting our expectations of a teammate and we want to see change.’ They really took ownership of that process. And from that day on there were no issues with this player.
“As a coach, the way you can deal with things most appropriately is going back to your values. Because it’s difficult to send a player home. It was going to be a massive controversy. You would have been reading about it for five days straight. But we were prepared to do it, because he wasn’t meeting the standards of the group, and the group was prepared to do it as well.”
–Field Level Media