Gregg Berhalter Is Back, but He Also Never Really Went Away
A public scandal almost derailed the head coach’s USMNT career, but U.S. Soccer ultimately stuck with Berhalter—the architect of a system that still thrived in his absence, culminating in a victory over Canada in the Nations League final
The Who warned us in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The new boss is indeed the same as the old boss. On Friday, U.S. Soccer announced Gregg Berhalter as the full-time successor to Gregg Berhalter, reintroducing him as the head coach of the men’s national team. Berhalter is expected to retake the reins later this year and lead the team through the 2024 Copa América and 2026 World Cup, both of which will be played (largely) in the United States.
To get you caught up, as briefly as possible, Berhalter’s contract with U.S. Soccer expired on December 31; at the time, he was being investigated for a report of domestic violence against his now-wife while they were dating as undergrad students, three decades ago. The parents of U.S. forward Gio Reyna—Claudio and Danielle Reyna, who are both former U.S. national team players, not to mention college teammates and lifelong friends of the Berhalters—gave the report to the federation after Berhalter told attendees at an off-the-record conference that a player had nearly been sent home from the 2022 World Cup because of a bad attitude. Berhalter’s words leaked out, and it was soon revealed that he was referring to Gio Reyna. An outside investigation released on March 13 found that while Berhalter’s conduct “likely constituted the misdemeanor crime of assault on a female,” evidence suggested it was an isolated event, and that Berhalter did not improperly withhold information from U.S. Soccer. The federation said in a statement that he remained a candidate for the head coach position. In the meantime, some shuffling at the top of the organization led to the hire of a new sporting director, Matt Crocker, who began the job in late May. His first objective: bring in a head coach.
Crocker worked without a budget and had no mandate to hire an American. He was free to interview whomever he pleased, without concern for salary expectations or buyout costs from existing jobs. More than 10 candidates were considered, and several of them were put through a final round consisting of more than 10 hours of tests, interviews, and presentations. Going into that process, Crocker had never met Berhalter, who guided a very young and inexperienced team to a credible round-of-16 finish at the 2022 World Cup, but the two soon found they were kindred spirits. “Every step of the way, Gregg scored phenomenally,” Crocker said at a press conference on Friday. Berhalter, for his part, was impressed with Crocker’s meticulousness.
Last Wednesday, Berhalter got a call from Crocker and was told he would be rehired. “It was a great feeling,” Berhalter said on Friday. “You can imagine what the last six months have been like.”
But if Gregg Berhalter is back, he also never really went away.
Berhalter was succeeded by his former national team assistant, Anthony Hudson, on an interim basis. When Hudson left for a job in Qatar on May 30, another Berhalter staffer, B.J. Callaghan, stepped in. Hudson and Callaghan changed virtually nothing about the way the national team operated. The team’s philosophy, formation, tactics, and even mood were all the same. The interim and the interim-interim coaches even sounded like Berhalter when they addressed the team.
“It’s been more of the same, really,” goalkeeper Matt Turner said about the team’s June camp for the CONCACAF Nations League finals. “You’ve got a similar player pool, a similar style of play, and the same exact expectation as under Anthony and Gregg.”
In the spring, Berhalter—who seemed uncommonly close with many of his players, even though he spent most of the time during the team’s camps sequestered with his staff—traveled to England to meet with and study the work of several other coaches. While he was there, he met with just about the entire spine of the national team, which is active in the Premier League—Christian Pulisic, Turner, Tim Ream, Antonee Robinson, Tyler Adams, Brenden Aaronson, and Weston McKennie. “Funnily enough, nothing related to the team came up in almost all the cases,” Berhalter said. “It was really about just supporting them. Nothing regarding my status with the team was a subject of the conversations.”
In his absence, Berhalter’s system was still thriving. It survived what turned out to be a temporary departure by its architect. It endured because of Berhalter’s meticulous planning, his careful cultivation of team culture, and his lucid communication. There’s a good reason, in the wake of an impressive inaugural World Cup, several high-ranking federation officials privately, and publicly, spoke glowingly of the job Berhalter had done and said that they believed he would have long since been reappointed were it not for the investigation. It was little wonder that several players—Pulisic, Turner, and Timothy Weah—said publicly that they wanted Berhalter back before he was reappointed and before they had any incentive to back one potential manager over another.
Pulisic, in fact, credited the foundation Berhalter laid for the 3-0 thumping that the Americans handed archrival Mexico on Friday in the semifinal of the Nations League. “You can see, today is a testament of the work that [Berhalter] put into this team,” Pulisic told reporters, per ESPN. “B.J. picked up right where he left off.” It was a sentiment that Callaghan echoed.
Under Berhalter, the U.S. played well in Qatar, impressed coaches from other countries, and survived the group stage. Since then, Hudson and Callaghan, playing Berhalter ball, lost just once in seven games, winning four times and lifting a second straight Nations League trophy by beating the USA’s two biggest regional rivals in Mexico and Canada. Moving on from Berhalter would have meant arresting that momentum and starting over on a lot of things. After all, what would be the point of hiring somebody else if they wouldn’t do things substantially differently? Besides, such a move might have upset the players, whose leadership council was consulted by Crocker in the hiring process and made its warm feelings toward Berhalter very clear.
The problem with bringing Berhalter back, inasmuch as he’d even been gone, was one of optics, not performance. He was both the proven and the messy choice. What do you do when the straightforward and internally popular candidate is also the complicated and (among lots of loud voices on Twitter) unpopular one?
A number of things can be true at once. The grotesque spectacle of a very public scandal involving two of the leading families in American soccer, laying bare the deeply incestuous core of the U.S. game, could feel disqualifying for Berhalter’s return. Second terms tend to not work out well for USMNT head coaches—Bruce Arena’s second World Cup was a disappointment; Bob Bradley and Jurgen Klinsmann never even made it to their second big dance. That said, a search for a successor could have been broad, painstaking, data-driven, and conducted in good faith while still concluding that the quasi-incumbent remained the best man for the job. A search that ran slowly and deliberately only to arrive back at the status quo is not necessarily a search that didn’t need to happen or that constituted a waste of time. Even though Berhalter and Gio Reyna, one of the brightest prospects this nation has ever produced, now have heavy baggage, they can still forge a productive future.
While Crocker was free to recommend whichever hire he liked to the federation’s board, there is only a sliver of an overlapping area in the Venn diagram of coaches who are well-prepared to guide a talented team to a breakout World Cup on home soil, who grasp the peculiarities of the CONCACAF region and the American game, and who are willing to take the job—which held only narrow appeal to the world’s leading coaches. You can think that Berhalter wasn’t getting everything that he could have out of this team while acknowledging that there wasn’t really anybody else who could step in and do better with only a handful of camps before next year’s Copa América—the only major competition outside of the CONCACAF region that can help the U.S. prepare for the World Cup.
Berhalter was in discussions with Mexican juggernaut Club América about its managerial opening when he was invited to interview for his old job. He had also been linked to several jobs in Europe, including Swansea City and Sparta Rotterdam. But Berhalter fretted that if he didn’t see the American project through to its natural culmination in 2026, he would regret it. “When I took over in 2018, I was coaching kids,” Berhalter said. “And to see the development of this group, as individuals and the team, has been amazing. The progress that they’ve made in their careers made me think about the next three years. If we continue to develop in the way that we have, what is it going to look like? That was exciting. Because if this group continues to go where we think they could go, the sky is the limit.”
Berhalter couldn’t walk away now. He had to return to the job he never really left.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a regular contributor on soccer to The Ringer. He is writing a book about the United States men’s national team for Viking Books. He teaches at Marist College.