What USA World Cup stars told Gio Reyna

England head for home as World Cup hopes are ended

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Borussia Dortmund starlet Gio Reyna was reportedly almost sent home from the World Cup due to a lack of effort and “extreme” behaviour. The attacking midfielder failed to start a single game in Qatar but played the whole of the second half when his country lost to the Netherlands in the quarter-finals. Last week, USA boss Greg Berhalter told a leadership summit that an “unnamed” player had fallen foul of the team’s standards and then explained how the rest of the squad reacted.

Reyna is one of the best young players in the Bundesliga and has already played 93 times for Dortmund, despite being just 20 years old. And the ace was tipped to play a starring role in Qatar.

But The Athletic have now reported that Reyna was the player Berhalter was referring to at the summit after the star showed an alarming lack of effort in training ahead of his country’s opening match against Wales, before displaying a paucity of intensity in a scrimmage against Qatari club Al Gharafa SC on November 17.

Berhalter, who guided his team to victory over Iran in the group stages, addressed the issue as he spoke at the HOW Institute for Society’s Summit on Moral Leadership in New York last Tuesday following his team’s World Cup exit.

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The 49-year-old said: “In this last World Cup, we had a player that was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field. 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 apologise to the group, but it’s going to have to say why you’re apologising. It’s going to have to go deeper than just, ‘guys, I’m sorry.’ And I prepped the leadership group with this.

“I said, ‘okay this guy’s going to apologise to you as a group, to the whole team.’ And what was fantastic in this whole thing is that after he apologised, they stood up one by one and said, ‘listen, it hasn’t been good enough, you haven’t been meeting our expectations of a team-mate 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.”

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