Gio Reyna Is Growing Up and Ready to Seize His Copa América Chance
After a stunted few years defined by injury and scandal, the prodigious USMNT playmaker is primed to star for the national team and reinvent his club career. “I’m looking forward to getting back out there and staying healthy and playing games for … whoever it is,” he tells The Ringer.Gio Reyna Is Growing Up and Ready to Seize His Copa América Chance
After a stunted few years defined by injury and scandal, the prodigious USMNT playmaker is primed to star for the national team and reinvent his club career. “I’m looking forward to getting back out there and staying healthy and playing games for … whoever it is,” he tells The Ringer.
If you look really carefully and catch him in just the right light, say, a beam of sunlight streaming into a midtown Manhattan conference room, you can see the very first gray interlopers poking through Gio Reyna’s jet-black hair.
It’s probably genetic. Reyna may be only 21, but his father, Claudio, had the salt-and-pepper thing going on well before he ended his 13-year, four–World Cup U.S. men’s national team career. Also, Reyna has been through a lot lately.
Today, he looks tan and relaxed. It’s a sunny afternoon in late May. He just came back from a quick vacation to Turks and Caicos, where he got engaged to his partner, Chloe. Reyna laughs as he keeps forgetting to refer to her as his fiancée rather than as his girlfriend, as she’s been reminding him to, even though it’s been only a few days. Other grown-up things have occupied him lately. He’s learning to cook. Reading more. Watching documentaries. Getting involved in managing his money. Sussing out who has earned a place in his shrinking social circle and who has not.
Today, he’s embarking on something of a New York City media tour to begin remaking his image, meeting people at a few television networks. After our interview, Reyna will get on the train and head down to Washington, D.C., to meet up with the United States men’s national team. He is excited for the trip. He hasn’t taken a train since he was a kid. And it will put some more distance between him and his miserable season.
It’s tempting to do the sportswriter-y thing here and pronounce this as a make-or-break summer for Reyna. It isn’t. Soccer careers don’t really work like that. They’re not linear. There will be other chances to boost his stock, just as there will be more rough patches to slog through. But this would be a very opportune time for Reyna to really do something, to make his mark on the Copa América tournament pitting most of the Western Hemisphere’s top soccer nations against one another, held stateside beginning Thursday. After a lost season—in which Reyna was buried down Borussia Dortmund’s cluttered depth chart and he later observed from the bench as Nottingham Forest staved off relegation from the Premier League—something has to give. Five seasons into his professional career, Reyna seems to have run into a dead end at the club that brought him to Europe at 16 and reached the Champions League final this month without him, even though his Dortmund contract runs for two more seasons following his return from loan at Forest.
So, yes, this would be a good moment for Reyna to flash his outsize talent, which made him a finalist for the 2021 Golden Boy award. And the USMNT would certainly be all the better for it. He’s fully restored to the team after an infamous row with head coach Gregg Berhalter. Reyna was the squad’s best player in March, when the U.S. won its third straight CONCACAF Nations League title. He and Berhalter have moved on from such ugliness. There are more games to be won. Copa América will be the USMNT’s biggest test before the 2026 World Cup on home soil. If the Americans don’t perform, the discourse over the next two years will inevitably turn angsty, and much of the momentum gathered in a promising 2022 World Cup showing will be squandered.
The quiet truth is that for this national team generation and all its unprecedented talent to reach its lofty ceiling, it surely needs Reyna. Because to contend internationally, you must beat world-class teams. And to beat world-class teams, you need someone who can pick apart an elite back line, someone who can both see and deliver that ball—which is to say: a Gio Reyna. “Gio has this ability to make final passes that are at a very high level,” Berhalter tells The Ringer. “That, in the end, helps unlock defenses. He can do it consistently. The weight of his passes is perfect.”
The U.S. has never really had a talent like Reyna before, packing so much athleticism, soccer savvy, and pure, uncut talent into his tall frame. But it needs him to put it all together.
In other words, it needs Gio Reyna all grown up.
Here’s where we should probably acknowledge That Whole Thing.
Short version (or you can read the long version here): Reyna grew petulant at the 2022 World Cup and trained half-heartedly for a few days after learning that his role would be limited in the opening game. Reyna was almost sent home but corrected his behavior and earned more minutes in the United States’ final game. After the tournament, Berhalter spoke about Reyna’s near expulsion at a leadership conference that was supposed to be off the record—while The Athletic was already piecing the story together anyway—but his comments were accidentally published. About a week after the conference, his parents, Claudio and Danielle, complained to the U.S. Soccer Federation about Berhalter’s comments and reportedly made oblique threats about revealing a decades-old domestic violence incident between Berhalter and his now wife. The whole sordid deal spilled out into the open when Berhalter posted a statement on Twitter to get ahead of the story, making global headlines.
U.S. Soccer launched an investigation, and roughly six months after Berhalter’s contract had expired, it announced that Berhalter would be rehired. Berhalter was always likely to be reappointed but couldn’t officially be renewed through the 2026 World Cup until he was cleared of further wrongdoing. Reyna’s actions were the spark for the scandal, yet it also wasn’t really about him. Still, he’s been trying to get out from under that story ever since, as has Berhalter. “I feel like it was blown a bit out of proportion,” Reyna tells The Ringer. “Obviously, it was just unfortunate how everything turned out. We’re both just moving on and want to look forward to the national team now. We’re just past it.”
The scandal was just one of multiple worries for the young player, including staying healthy. Over the course of the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons combined, Reyna had no fewer than 10 injuries that sidelined him for at least a week, per Transfermarkt. Some were minor knocks; others were serious muscular issues. In all, he missed a cumulative 386 days over the span of those two campaigns. When Reyna finally returned to full fitness, he ran into a logjam of talented teammates competing for playing time at Dortmund. Whereas Reyna had been a regular starter in 2020-21, the season he turned 18, he was now relegated to a role coming off the bench: He did the job well, a super sub of sorts who scored five goals. He played a crucial part in keeping Dortmund atop the Bundesliga table until the team’s heartbreaking final day of the 2022-23 season.
But then Reyna missed the first month of the 2023-24 season with a hairline fracture in his fibula, suffered during a two-assist man-of-the-match performance against Canada in the 2023 CONCACAF Nations League final. By the time he healed up, Reyna was further down Dortmund manager Edin Terzic’s pecking order. When Jadon Sancho returned to the club on loan from Manchester United in January, Reyna was the odd man out, and he went out on loan to Forest. He wound up playing even less (10 appearances, 236 total minutes) than he had in the first half of the season with Dortmund (14 appearances, 371 minutes). Between the two teams, he had zero goals and just a single assist to show for a year of work at the club level.
Only the CONCACAF Nations League finals in March brought a reprieve from an unhappy season. Reyna came on at halftime in the semifinal against Jamaica, with the U.S. behind, and ran the game, doling out two assists to Haji Wright in a 3-1 extra-time win.
In the final, Reyna, who would be named the player of the tournament, scored the match’s second goal from a half volley to vanquish Mexico 2-0. For his celebration, he ran to a corner of the Dallas Cowboys stadium and pointed to the luxury box where his parents were seated.
Moments like that goal in the Nations League final—let’s call them Gio Moments.
They’re moments like his first professional goal, in the German Cup in February 2020, which made Reyna the youngest goal scorer in the tournament’s 85-year history at 17 years and 82 days old. Four Werder Bremen defenders flailed at him as Reyna weaved past them and curled a shot perfectly into the top right corner of the goal.
The first Gio Moments occurred in the backyard of the Reynas’ home in northern England, where Gio was born, at the time when Claudio was playing for Sunderland in the Premier League. Those are some of his first soccer memories, kicking the ball at pop-up nets as a toddler with his older brother, Jack. “That’s really where you fall in love with it,” Reyna remembers.
It was always him and Jack, kicking, competing, fighting. The brothers were inseparable, in spite of a nearly four-year age gap. “He’s really the one that introduced me to the game—along with, of course, my dad—but the feistiness and the competitiveness, everything kind of comes from those moments,” Reyna says. “[Jack] was definitely the most involved.” When the family moved back to the United States in 2007 and settled in Bedford, New York, about 30 miles north of the Bronx, Jack began bringing his little brother along with him to soccer practices, as well as to pickup games with his friends. Gio was always playing with the older kids even though he was small. Always with Jack.
When Reyna was 9, Jack died from a years-long battle with a brain tumor, at the age of 13.
Gio and Claudio both have tattoos of a snippet of a letter Jack wrote before passing away. Claudio’s is a few lines long; Gio’s simply says “love Jack.” It’s his only tattoo.
When Claudio joined in on those backyard games, they would play two-on-one, forcing Gio to think about spacing: how to read it, manipulate it. This interested him innately. “When I was in Europe, Gio would watch the games, where other kids [would watch for] two minutes and go,” Claudio says. “He was fully watching the patterns on the field. He just had an interest in the choreographing of soccer movement. It was kind of natural.”
Now, Gio watches a soccer game most days. Unlike much of his generation, or indeed the ones before it, he pays close attention. No other screens to distract him. He studies the play. It’s how his tactical nous developed at a young age, how it develops still. “It comes from my love of the game, watching soccer, talking soccer,” Reyna says. “I was just really, really interested. ... I’m a soccer junkie. Sometimes I catch myself having to step away a bit.”
When Reyna hit puberty, it was clear that he was good. But he wasn’t just skillful; he was uncommonly cerebral. Reyna picked up on the little details, the nuances of the game—how goals are actually made or how they’re prevented. And then he put that informational edge to use in his games as part of the New York City FC youth academy. “He would take the first few minutes,” Claudio remembers. “He wouldn’t start the games off gung ho. He was looking around and taking everything in. And I was always like, ‘Come on, get into it, get going, get the ball.’ And he’d sort of just ease into the game, and I started to realize that he would try to understand where everybody was going to be around him.”
Dave van den Bergh, then the USMNT under-15 head coach, couldn’t help but notice the same thing when he first called 13-year-old Reyna up to the U-15 side. “His tactical savvy was already there at that point,” says van den Bergh, who had attended the tactics-obsessed Ajax Amsterdam academy. “He knew where the game could be won and he acted on it, which was pretty remarkable for a young kid.”
As he grew into his body, Reyna displayed not only his father’s touch and vision as a midfielder, but also the athleticism of his mother, once a speedy winger with a brief U.S. women’s national team career. Reyna could dunk a basketball in the eighth grade even though he wasn’t done growing. On the soccer field, he still doesn’t look fast, but he’s deceptively quick, able to glide past opponents. “It’s pretty clear that Gio got the best of all their qualities,” says Landon Donovan, the USMNT’s co-all-time leading scorer and a teammate of Claudio’s when Jack and Gio would tag along to national team camps. “He’s quite different than Claudio certainly was. Gio plays in a much more powerful, dynamic fashion. Claudio was sort of methodical and technically so gifted, saw the field so well. And Gio has a lot of those talents as well, but he’s just physically very gifted and more direct in a lot of ways.”
At the New York City FC academy—which Reyna joined in its inaugural year, 2015, as Claudio worked as the MLS club’s first sporting director—Reyna played on an under-15 squad with fellow future national teamers Joe Scally and James Sands. The NYCFC academy teams entered tournaments that confronted the players with elite opponents, such as Real Madrid’s academy team. But whenever the opposition leveled up, Reyna met it there. “If you challenged him [by playing] two, three, four, five years up [in age], he would adapt to the environment so quickly, and you would see him do things that were just steps ahead,” says Matt Pilkington, one of the academy coaches at the time. “We were constantly trying to challenge him. He would do things occasionally in a pressure situation where you saw things that you hadn’t seen at that level before. He had a special ability to adapt.”
After adjusting to a growth spurt, Reyna developed a rare prowess for beating a defender on both the inside and outside to score goals. But he was intimidated and unsure of his abilities at first, after making the under-15 boys’ national team a year ahead of schedule. “And when he just kind of was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m just gonna play some soccer,’ nobody could stop him,” van den Bergh says. “He was probably 14 when that switch happened for him. He never looked back.”
Another Gio Moment: his first big tournament with the U-15 team, in Argentina, where Claudio’s father grew up and played professionally. In a match against Uruguay, Gio was brought down by a defender, hopped back up without breaking stride, and calmly slotted the ball into the net.
At a prestigious youth tournament in Italy, Reyna bagged three goals and four assists, lifting the U.S. to the title game against an England team that included future Premier League stars Cole Palmer and Noni Madueke and now–USMNT teammate Yunus Musah. And then Reyna scored his fourth goal of the tournament, to win the trophy. Classic Gio Moment.
That’s when Reyna knew. That’s when everybody knew. “I had a great tournament, and I gained a lot of confidence from playing against those countries, doing really, really well—the best player probably in the tournament,” he says. “If I could do it at the highest level, the international stage, then I could probably go somewhere with this.” Before long, Reyna had an agent, a long-term contract with Adidas, and a Portuguese passport through his paternal grandmother—his ticket to Europe at 16, when Dortmund beat out Ajax and others for his signature.
A weird thing we do in our culture is fixate on the stars of not so much tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. We have a prodigy problem. An outsize appetite for peering into the future and demanding to know who our stars will be. It’s why we rank middle school basketball players. It’s also why you can look up how your kid’s under-8 travel baseball team stacks up against the other teams in the nation. When Gio Reyna registered 46 appearances for Borussia Dortmund during the 2020-21 season—tied for the third most on the team; his seven goals in all competitions ranked fourth—his stature soared. Dortmund finished a distant third in the Bundesliga and was knocked out of the Champions League in the quarterfinals, but the 18-year-old Reyna had established himself as a prodigy who kept the company of other prodigies—Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham, and Jadon Sancho. They were equals then, constituent parts of the most talented young attack in Europe.
Reyna broke into Dortmund’s first team at an even younger age than national teammate and captain Christian Pulisic had—by a difference of roughly two months. Reyna was the youngest Bundesliga player to make 50 appearances. He was the third youngest to play in a knockout game in the Champions League—serving up an assist for Haaland’s game-winning goal, no less. He was the youngest player to record a hat trick of assists in one Bundesliga match.
The youngest, the youngest, the youngest.
Reyna dazzled. He excelled playing with his talented teammates. “We all had a blast,” he says. “We were all young and hungry and free playing. We all fed off each other with the energy and talent we all had, and we all worked really well together. It was just a really nice couple of years with those guys playing with them.” The teammates grew close. Reyna and Bellingham remain best friends. Haaland drove Reyna around Dortmund for a while. The Norwegian striker called him “the American dream.”
At Dortmund, Reyna was internally compared to Spanish all-time great Andrés Iniesta, but taller. Tab Ramos, once the USMNT’s creative fulcrum in midfield and later the head coach of the under-20 national team, had a different comparison: “At 16, I thought he was the closest to [French legend Zinedine] Zidane that we would ever have.” At NYCFC, head coach Patrick Vieira, who pulled Reyna into first-team training with superstar veterans David Villa, Andrea Pirlo, and Frank Lampard, likened Reyna to Vieira’s World Cup–winning France teammate David Trezeguet.
(A few years later, Reyna casually dribbled through five Mexican opponents at the dreaded Estadio Azteca during a World Cup qualifier—Gio Moment! Berhalter noted after the game that the run reminded him of Diego Maradona’s 1986 “goal of the century” in that same venue.)
Perhaps it was all too much, too soon. All that exposure. All that attention. All those expectations. But then what was Gio supposed to do, Claudio pondered? Turn down the opportunity to break into Dortmund’s first team at 17? “You would never not take that,” Claudio says. “[Gio] didn’t expect it. Nobody did. At a club like Dortmund, everything is earned. The coach gave him the chance, and he fit into the team.”
Inevitably, Gio’s ascent leveled off, arrested by all those injuries. He readily acknowledges that he expected his hot start to carry on forever, that it perhaps made him a bit entitled. He had always played, after all—no matter how much younger he was than everybody else. Even when he hopped straight from an MLS academy to a perennial Bundesliga contender, he played. So why shouldn’t he expect to play? “I was a bit spoiled with just being able to play soccer whenever I want to,” he says. “And when something you love so much is just taken away from you for a year, it’s tough.”
This is how many soccer careers go. They’re cyclical. Injuries happen. Sometimes a lot of them. Staying healthy is a form of talent, too. But acceptance of a young player’s inevitable physical setbacks and performance swings seems to have eroded. This is perhaps the residue of the way Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo broke soccer and the way we think about it. They boarded the rocket ship as teenagers and never got off—largely staying healthy for two decades at the top.
Gradually, Dortmund’s quartet of forward prodigies moved on. Sancho’s future is uncertain after his ill-fated move to Manchester United; Haaland won two consecutive Premier League titles and Golden Boots at Manchester City; Bellingham is now perhaps the world’s most popular player after a sensational Champions League–winning season at Real Madrid. As for Reyna, he went nowhere. Well, he went to the physiotherapist. His father wonders whether one last late growth spurt was at fault for all the injuries. Whatever the case, all that bad luck knocked Reyna off track. “It made me learn a lot about my body,” he says. “It was tough for me, mentally and physically. In that year, I really learned a lot about myself. Who I want to be as a person. How to approach life on and off the field. What values I carry and what’s important to me. Obviously, I’m still working on them and growing as a person.”
When Reyna was finally healthy, he was crowded out. Dortmund had games to win. That’s how it goes at Europe’s mega-clubs. All that time on the bench changed the perception of Reyna, contrasted by Haaland’s and Bellingham’s systematic destruction of the Premier League and La Liga, respectively.
The choice of Forest for the second half of the season was unfortunate. Reyna reportedly had a smorgasbord of other options—three major clubs in France; three respected ones in Spain; another in Portugal and another in England. The move turned sour. He could never quite break through over fellow playmaker Morgan Gibbs-White under Forest’s newly hired manager, Nuno Espírito Santo. Things like that will happen, too.
Reyna has already been in the public consciousness for half a decade, long enough to think of him as being in his prime. Yet he’s far from that. “People forget that he’s a young player still because he’s been around awhile,” Berhalter says. “He’s a young player that’s still developing and still progressing in his career.”
If life had turned out differently, if he had been born with another set of talents and interests, Gio Reyna might have been a college upperclassman right about now. And like most 21-year-olds, he is suspended somewhere between a man in the making and a fully grown adult. Next summer, Gio and Chloe plan to marry and form their own two-person family. Yet as he prepared to propose to her, Gio leaned on his parents to help him figure out how to buy the engagement ring.
In that way, he isn’t so different from most of his teammates on the U.S. national team, a generation largely in its second World Cup cycle, yet still unusually young. That’s why, on the national team side, there remains a tolerance for the growing pains of a budding career, why Reyna slotted back into the team seamlessly after all the injuries and the aftermath of That Whole Thing. “He fits in really well because I think we all understand that none of us are finished products, and he’s a great example for everyone that there is the ability to progress,” Berhalter says. “People come through the group at different stages of their lives, and it’s really about alignment and everyone being there for each other. And Gio embodies that. He’s a guy that’s been on a journey, and he’s a player that can be counted on.”
Reyna grew up in the spotlight, making his teenage mistakes publicly. “It’s part of it,” he says. “No one’s perfect. I think if you look through a lot of players’ careers, they all had a moment they wish didn’t happen, that they regret doing. When you’re a teenager, you just want to play, play, play, play, play. But it’s not the reality of it. I’ve learned that part of it and how to deal with my emotions a bit better on and off the field. It’s not easy.”
He has learned to channel his competitiveness, to put it to work on the field, while also acknowledging that his intensity is his superpower. “On the outside, maybe [my image] is a feisty, sometimes-with-an-attitude, arrogant kind of high-headed little kid, which has gotten me to where I am,” he says. “If I don’t have that feistiness or that high head—that’s kind of what I need to be at my best, when I’m sort of angry in a way. In that year when I was working on things, that’s one of the things that you’re trying to control. You learn from experiences. I’ve grown in that aspect and seen myself make jumps. I’ve grown a lot.”
Echoing Reyna’s emphasis on growth, Donovan thinks there might be some use in Reyna’s disappointing World Cup, when he clocked just 53 minutes of action. “The whole situation at the World Cup was probably really good for him long term,” Donovan says. “In ’06, I was terrible in the World Cup, and it really catapulted me to have the career I wanted. It seems like [Gio] has really learned a lot from it, and I think that will help him long-term. It’s good for players to go through hard things, even though it sucks in the moment. It seems like he’s really matured.”
Joe Scally, Reyna’s NYCFC academy friend and frequent USMNT roommate, has seen that growth in Reyna, too. “It hasn’t been the best two years for him, but he’s always so focused and positive,” Scally says. “You can see the maturity that he has.” Scally can tell in the way Reyna now prepares his body before practice and the way he recovers afterward. Reyna has improved his diet. He has a personal physiotherapist who travels with him. All the better to keep those injuries at bay.
Youth is never more fleeting than in pro sports. You only get so many years in soccer. Reyna wants to position himself the best he can for the next ones while salvaging what he can from the last. “I’m not happy by any means with the way Nottingham turned out, or Dortmund, the last season, but you’ve just gotta try to learn and see what you can take out of it,” he says. “If you just say, ‘This is shit, and this is shit, and this is shit,’ that’s helping nobody. It’s: What can you do better? What could you change? Of course, maybe other people played a part in it, but you just have to look at yourself at the end of the day.
“Last season was a bit unfortunate,” Reyna continues. “Looking forward, [I want] to find a place that suits me, whether it’s at Dortmund or somewhere else, just to really be able to play and fight for a spot so that I can be an important part of the team. I think that’s what I need to do to show my talent to everyone. I know I still have it, and I know where my talent can take me. I know what I’m capable of. ... I’m looking forward to getting back out there and staying healthy and playing games for … whoever it is.”
Gio Reyna has worked through this down cycle in his career. He’s learned from it. Adjusted. Made the best of it. Now he’s ready for another upswing.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a regular contributor on soccer to The Ringer. The Long Game, his book on the United States men’s national team, will be published by Viking Books ahead of the 2026 World Cup. He teaches at Marist College.