The Berhalter-Reyna Saga Stems From An Insular US Soccer Culture

To understand how America finds itself in an ugly saga involving a domestic violence incident from three decades ago and the families of US Soccer national team coach Gregg Berhalter and player Giovanni Reyna, you might rewind about six years.

At the time, then-manager Bruce Arena was trying to rescue the USMNT from a disastrous start to the final round of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying that got former manager Jurgen Klinsmann fired. And as the most accomplished US manager in history — who had just re-taken the reigns after the departure of a global soccer icon — he advocated as aggressively as perhaps anyone ever has for the quality of American soccer coaches in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“There is nothing about soccer we don’t know,” Arena said in one of the most eyebrow-raising portions of the interview. “A lot of coaching is just about having an eye for players, and knowing what they do well and don’t do well, and communicating with them.”

Arena’s somewhat defiant attitude was certainly understandable amid a history of discrimination against American players and managers in the European club game and beyond. And although his rescue bid to qualify for 2018 failed, the US Soccer Federation appeared to lean into the idea that Americans are as qualified as anyone to lead the program forward.

But that question — whether an American coach was “good enough” to lead a national team program with high aspirations — may have obscured the better reason to consider outside candidates for all sorts of coaching and executive roles. While the American player pool has expanded dramatically since Arena’s first time in charge from 1999 to 2006, the US coaching pool is about a generation behind. And being hired from a small pool in which everyone is a familiar entity can make it challenging for any manager to assert his ideas and independence.

That reality is coming into focus now as US Soccer handles one of its most embarrassing scandals in its modern history. And whoever you empathize with, it’s hard to deny the root of the friction is a scenario in which all the key figures have an unusually long history with each other, resulting in a climate where the lines between professional and personal are easily blurred.

To recap what has transpired:

On Tuesday, Gregg Berhalter issued a statement via Twitter saying someone had approached him threatening to disclose information about a domestic violence incident involving him and his wife Rosalind when they were both underclassmen playing soccer at the University of North Carolina, in an effort to remove Berhalter as US national team coach. (Berhalter’s contract expired Dec. 31, but the two sides were thought to be in talks about an extension.) The statement also relayed Berhalter’s account of the event, its aftermath and how it shaped the couple’s relationship to the present day. The same day, US Soccer also issued a statement saying it had commissioned an independent investigation into the incident involving the Berhalters, as well as the related potential blackmailing claims.

On Wednesday, The Athletic and ESPN both reported that Claudio and Danielle Reyna, the parents of US winger Gio Reyna, had been the source of that information. According to ESPN, sources near US Soccer said Claudio had threatened to share the history of the incident publicly. Both Claudio and Danielle issued statements admitting that they had discussed the matter with US soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart. But each denied threatening to go public with the information or wanting to use it as leverage to end Berhalter’s tenure in charge of the national team.

The Reynas said the root of their frustration was that they had kept a potentially damaging transgression from Gregg Berhalter’s youth private. And they felt Berhalter should have done the same for their son when instead he revealed — without naming Gio Reyna directly — the 20-year-old’s poor reaction to learning he would have a limited role at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

It’s a messy melodrama, one that will understandably have followers of the US men’s soccer program choosing sides. But instead of trying to sort out whose perspective is most reliable or deserves the most empathy, perhaps the time is better spent asking these bigger picture questions:

• Why do the parents of a US national team player have a direct audience with the program’s sporting director?
• Why does the national team manager feel sufficiently threatened by that relationship that he believes it could end his relationship with US soccer?
• Why would the family of a player have such personal information about the manager’s behavior from 30 years ago?

The answer is that the current pool of American managers, sporting directors and other executives is still very small relative to the player pool, and is comprised of people whose roots often intersect in ways that more closely reflect a family than your average athletic workplace.

Gregg Berhalter, Stewart and Claudio Reyna all played together on the US national team. Rosalind Berhalter and Danielle Reyna roomed together while playing college soccer at the University of North Carolina. Claudio Reyna also acquired the Berhalters’ son Sebastian on loan as sporting director of Austin FC from Columbus. Sebastian started at the club not long after his father left Columbus for the national team.

This kind of scandal is not completely unprecedented in the soccer world or in other athletics. (The wives of England national team players Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy have had a famous spat that went so far as to result in libel charges.) And it’s probably impossible to truly keep professional and personal lives separate in an athletic environment, where there is an unusual amount of shared travel time, collaboration and trust shared between players and coaches.

But it’s a good practice to try and limit where those lines blur as much as possible. And it’s a good reason for a program with a narrow history like the US men’s or women’s national team to purposefully seek outside perspectives, even if the quality of American coaches or executives isn’t necessarily lacking.

The good news is that this will probably be a short-lived problem. Currently, US Soccer and Major League Soccer are drawing their coaches and executives from a generation when there were only 10-12 MLS teams and only a handful of successful American players in Europe. In the next generation, they’ll be drawing from a much wider base of former players. In 2023, MLS will have 29 teams. And the number of Americans playing at a high level in Europe is at a historic high.

Down the line, that will mean a day will come when hiring a quality American manager won’t necessarily require hiring someone who has a lot of familiarity within a small circle. Until then, US Soccer has to quickly figure out a satisfactory route out of this mess. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup on US soil only three-and-a-half short years away.