by Gregg Berhalter was the man in charge of the team representing the most powerful nation on the planet at its biggest sporting event five months ago, yet his career is testament to the fact that a lot in football can change quickly.
The head coach of the United States men’s national team. [USMNT] in the World Cup final in Qatar, he is in England this month to watch some games and explore the future. Not too long ago he would have anticipated getting close to a home World Cup final in 2026 at the same job, though nothing is quite so certain now. Events since his team lost to the Netherlands in the round of 16 on December 3 have threatened to overshadow everything.
Naturally, that’s a frustration for the 49-year-old Berhalter, a man who of late has been forced to discuss in public the private events of a sensitive nature from more than 30 years before the saga unfolded. “The only way to describe it is sad,” he says when we meet in a London hotel. “It is unfortunate that this is the world we live in.
“I think it took a lot of attention away from a great World Cup performance. It took a lot of attention away from how good the team is and how strong it was. Team mentality. The guys were amazing at the World Cup. So focused, so disciplined and for a young team it was really amazing to see it from the coach’s point of view.”
He is choosing to speak out now due to an investigation by his former employer, the US Soccer Federation. [USSF] has declared you a suitable person to reapply for your previous job. His contract with the USSF expired at the end of last year and since then this story has accelerated. The series of events that brought him here is not a simple one.
For details spanning 30 years, the families of the Berhalters and Reynas, Claudio, Danielle and one of their children, current Borussia Dortmund and USMNT midfielder Gio, will want to check out this timeline. Friendships, fights, and a fleeting moment on a drunken night in 1992, may seem like fodder for the great American novel (and requires almost as many words to explain it). Earlier this year, when Berhalter and his wife Rosalind released a statement detailing a 1992 incident when the couple were 18, and during an argument outside a bar, Gregg had responded to a punch to the face of his then-girlfriend kicking her .
‘The only way to describe it is sad’
“Zero excuses,” Berhalter said of his behavior in the statement, for which he had self-reported at the time and sought advice. The couple, who have been married for 25 years and have four children, did so, they said, because they were threatened with disclosure. Danielle, a college friend of Rosalind’s, would later reveal that she raised the 1992 incident with USSF officials in December amid complaints about Berhalter’s treatment of Gio.
Hence the independent investigation commissioned by the USSF into Berhalter and the Reynas. The report was unequivocal about Berhalter: the 1992 incident was the only one for which he had claimed responsibility. It was a less easy read for the Reynas. Both had refused to be interviewed by the investigation lawyers. The report painted a picture of Claudio as a gimmicky soccer dad. There were accounts of angry text messages he sent to USSF coaches over Gio’s treatment. He privately lobbied for his son’s red card to be revoked. Reyna’s agent calls the report “grossly unfair.”
Berhalter has another vision of the saga. “The only way to describe it is sad,” he says when we meet in a London hotel. “It is unfortunate that this is the world we live in. I think it took a lot of attention away from a great World Cup performance. He took a lot of attention away from how good the team is and how strong it was. Team mentality. The guys were amazing at the World Cup. So focused, so disciplined and for a young team it was really amazing to see it from the coach’s point of view.”
He is proud of his record. A member of the 2002 World Cup team that reached the quarterfinals, the best finish in USMNT history, Berhalter led the current USMNT 12 places to 13th in the FIFA rankings. He matched the team’s best World Cup group point total and set a USMNT record of two clean sheets. His 74 percent win rate is the highest ever for a USMNT coach. “Lots of good milestones,” says Berhalter. Then came the Reyna affair.
“It was difficult,” says Berhalter. “After getting knocked out of the World Cup you want to enjoy a vacation and get rid of everything and then this comes up. It hangs during the holidays. We didn’t get the mental break. Then a couple of weeks after it all came out, my wife and I were walking down the street and we started to see positive things.
“This is how we see the world. We try to find positives in things. We feel that we are a very good example for our children. Saying, ‘Okay, this is how Mommy and Daddy handled something like this. They are proud of us. Our children are 21, 19, 15 and nine. They can understand things. That was good. The amount of support I receive from individuals and people who reach out. Me and my wife. So all of that has been really positive. That has helped.”
“We weren’t going to let something we dealt with decades ago hurt us again”
The statement the couple issued meant they took control. “I talked to my wife and the beauty of it is that we have people who have known us for our entire relationship and have been there for the entire relationship. We weren’t going to let something that happened when we were 18, that we faced when we were 18, hurt us again. We have learned a lot from that experience. And that made us better people and helped us have a better relationship. We weren’t going to hide from it because it really helped us.
“The other thing that we tell our children is that everything is in line with our values of who we are as people. We are honest people and we approach the world that way. It was in line with our way of acting.”
On the difficult subject of the Reynas, with whom the connection goes back to childhood in the case of Gregg and Claudio, he says this: “I would only say that it is a sad situation. We are talking about people you have known for more than three decades. It’s sad and somehow traumatic. But it’s something you have to deal with.”
He is optimistic about the future, and is now clear about reapplying for the job in the US, which is clearly a matter of great personal importance. What happens is unknown. The next USSF athletic director to succeed Berhalter’s former teammate, Earnie Stewart, will make that decision. Currently the team faces this month’s games under the orders of Berhalter’s former assistant, English coach Anthony Hudson.
“I guess what [the USSF report] it means there are options,” says Berhalter. “Which would still be under consideration, nothing will exclude me from being part of that process and there are other processes that are going on as well. After the work that’s been done, that’s the right thing to do. Whether it’s offered or not, or taken or not, that’s a whole different story. Not being part of the process would be difficult. For the team’s achievements and how much the team has grown in the last four years.”
He has been touring Europe in recent weeks, including a visit to Real Madrid. It will be tempting for English football to focus on the otherness of the native American football manager, but Berhalter has played in more European countries than the vast majority of English players. He speaks German, Dutch and Spanish. He earned his Uefa A and B licenses in Germany. He later became part of the successful Los Angeles Galaxy team as David Beckham’s teammate.
Prior to the USMNT, he spent five years with the Columbus Crew working on a considerably smaller budget than other MLS rivals, reaching the season-ending play-offs four times, including one MLS final.
“We cannot make general statements about the American trainers based on Marsch”
English soccer has proven to be a difficult frontier for American managers. Only Jesse Marsch, Bob Bradley and German-born former USMNT international David Wagner, now at Norwich City, have made it in the division, with limited success. Now there’s the added specter of Ted Lasso comparisons that Marsch tackled with good humor after his brief appointment at Leeds United.
“What I would say is that it’s too small a sample size,” says Berhalter. “We just can’t make blanket statements about American coaches based on two coaches. That’s the way to see it. They all have a unique quality. I could see if it had been 100 American trainers and you had more data. If I were trying to find out how, say, players from Poland perform in England and I only looked at two cases, I wouldn’t be doing my job very well. Everyone has a different upbringing and a different culture.”
He has a point. He played for three clubs in the Netherlands, including Sparta Rotterdam. His year at Palace was typical for the club at the time, a Championship battle under Steve Bruce and then Trevor Francis. He was a captain at Energie Cottbus, where training relied on the old East German principles of running, gymnastics and liberal use of the medicine ball. He became captain again in 1860 Munich. After being fired in 2013 from his first coaching job at Hammarby IF, in Stockholm, he traveled around European clubs to gain knowledge.
“A good yardstick was the World Cup [game against England],” he says.” When you looked at the game of the two teams, it seemed like a high-level game. And like any heavyweight fight, one team has the advantage and then the other team. This is how it should go. That’s how it looked. It was not one-way traffic. I think that has a lot to do with our player group. It has grown over the last four years and has matured. They think they can do it.”
Like his players, he would only like the chance to be judged on their own ability, not nationality or indeed the revelations that have come after the World Cup final. “I understand that the federation was obligated to investigate this matter,” he says, “and now that it is concluded, it can be used as an example of how the process works.”
