All this also means Gio is only a good player among many good players. Not some talismanic soccer god. Now, “only a good player” is pretty damn good, so this is more criticism of the fans that can’t imagine why he’d ever sit a minute than of Gio. As it regards the Nats, though, it does suggest that if he really is an indispensable auto starter for the Nats, then the Nats aren’t quite as good as we’d like to imagine. Again, not a slag on Gio, just reality. Since international soccer is a hard step below big 4/5 club soccer, maybe that’s ok. But it’s unclear to me what is reasonable to expect of the Nats outside of CONCACAF when a player having this kind of club challenge is also a key to national team success. There isn’t a one to one relationship, plenty of players thrive for country without being club stars. But there is correlation. it’s possible the Forest and Dortmund situations are very unusual and coincidental, and Gio would start for most other CL/PL clubs. But I’m not ready to assume that.
In his 16 starts at AM/CM for Dortmund, Gio had 5 goals and 4 assists. Before age 20. In a Top 4 league. Yeah, he really was that good. People forget that because of the injuries and drama. In his 7 matches at AM/CM for the US, Gio has 4 goals and 4 assists. He is that good and not simply good. Again, he had been injured. If used correctly, he should prove a pivotal player at the Copa.
There were rumors of a few clubs. None of us know how much fire was behind the smoke, but surely, SURELY, there was more than one singular option in the EPL. The Reyna camp seems to have been firm that THAT was the best move. Gio fired his agent and hired a new one who would get him there.
Indeed. There's also the fact that Dortmund wanted any loaning club to take on as much of his salary as possible. And some of the clubs we heard him linked to have been trying to shed salary as opposed to take more on. Really, there can be benefits to this whole thing. Just.............................new experience. Trying a new environment. Just because he wasn't getting on the field in games, doesn't mean the experience has had zero value. This happens in England to teams in a relegation battle. For some reason they just double down. Go EVEN HARDER with the players that put them in the relegation mess in the first place. It was like Benny Feilhaber at Derby. Forest was just lucky that there were 3 teams worse than them this year. When it comes to Forest, are the players they're using in Reyna's positions actually the problem? I like quite a few of their attacking midfield types. I like Gibbs-White. I like Hudson-Odoi. I like everyone with a hypthen. I like Elanga and others too. What they don't have is a #9 they trust. When you acquire 32 year old Chris Wood and think he's the solution...................you've got problems.
For £17 million he does OK. He's got more goals per minute played than Ollie Watkins, Son Heung-Min or Darwin Nuñez.
Is he, though? Every time I watched Forest, he missed 3 easy chances for every shot on goal. Nothing about Forest's recruitment makes any sense. Hell, they paid to acquire 3 damn goalkeepers this year. Turner, Vlachodimos, and Sels. And by the way, that was when they already had Horvath and Hennessey on the books. Then of course they got in FFP trouble because they've been doing that for a while now. Just acquire and acquire and acquire. Throw numbers at the problem. Why did they bring on Gio? I don't know. Because they could. I just never seem some sort of coherent plan. They have 29 players on the first team right now, and another 17 out on loan. Orel Malanga out on loan at Lyon. Remo Freuler at Bologna. Scott McKenna at Copenhagen. Its like.......................STOP! Just pick a team for Heven's sake.
From my perspective, Sevilla and Marseille have both had disappointing seasons for their standard (Europa League with CL aspirations, sometimes fulfilled) both being midtable sides this year, Sevilla was actually worse than that at the time inexplicably close to the relegation battle but turned it around, but if you look at the clubs the pedigree is obvious, in order: 1.Sevilla: repeated Europa League finalist, occasional CL squad, legit team in a bad year. A league that fits him to in style of play and a solid team that would play better, climbing up to mid table 12th position and -3 GD by seasons end. 2. Marseille: Typically a top 3-5 team in France, occasional threat to win the league, persistant Europa League and CL league caliber squad, quite consistently a good team. This is the worst year they've played in forever, and they still managed to make the Europa SF's this year, and they've qualified for Europe 4 of the past 5 years, and as an example since 2010-2011 they qualified for CL in some form 6 of those 15 years, Europa 5 of those 15 years, so I think they've qualified like 11 of the past 15 years or so. Consistently quite good, but not a real CL contender. They're 8th this year in points, but 6th in GD. 3. Wolves: Wolves is the crappiest of the options, firmly a mid table EPL side, they've basically finished between 10th and 13th four straight years, you'd have to back to 2019-2020 to find them missing out on European Competition on a tiebreaker to tottenham (they were tied on points). In a kind of wild sidenote I think I heard somewhere, they got promoted back to the EPL in '18-'19 five years ago, and actually qualified for Europe in that first year. Nottingham Forest in comparison to these sides is straight up total, ---, they haven't been relevant in Europe in what 45 years? They haven't been relevant in the EPL in the entire time I've paid attention (1999), in recent years this past decade I'm pretty sure at some point they were as far down as League One or League two, 3rd or 4th division. They suck, period, and the only reason they didnt get relegated this year was the championship sent up its worst trio of promoted sides I've ever seen. How on earth that ever sounded like a good idea in any universe? Seriously...If I'm Gio, I'm basically telling my dad, if I didn't tell him already, to walk away, back up, and back off and let me handle this. His parents made the WC experience worse, and this loan out the worst case scenario possible. Tell them to piss off, hire a new agent. Like, all of us, ALL OF US, on this board knew NF was the worst option and worse than going back to Dortmund for 5 months. How tf did Claudio not know that?!?! How??? It's not hard. The worst case scenario with the other 3 clubs is he's on too good of a team, and has less minutes than expected, but even there, those teams all went on runs and would have had minutes available during blow outs, and Gio would have better fit their style of play quite easily. Instead, he went with the patently worse and obviously worst choice. Again, if those are rumors and just fiction, fine, just stick with Dortmund and leave in June. Instead, he chose the worst of all options, a terrible loan, terrible experience, and his sentence at Dortmund has been extended a year. It could not have gone worse AGAIN. Gio's fall '21 to summer '24 is the worst stretch for US soccer probably since Mathis had his Germany-MLS experience.
Not there, you stay, and you're out on a free in 5 months. FFS, Wood like stuck the knife in to his club for years after they made a bad signing with him, refusing to budge off his wages. #1 There were 3 other rumored clubs, true or not, and #2 if not true, stick it out at Dortmund for 5 months, and then you're out on a free, happy day. Instead he went with literally the worst option possible, a terrible loan, a terrible experience, and his sentence with Dortmund extended another year if he can't find a buyer after yet another season of bad returns. Going to the NF was the worst of all options by far and it was obviously so in January too.
I forgot they were in there too, so Real Sociedad, Sevilla, Marseille, Wolves, and crap --- Nottingham Forest. This is Sesame Street level which of these doesn't belong with the others and they still managed to butcher it. In fairness, with these rumors, there are always teams where its probably just agent bull----, but I don't believe all of them were fictions and as previously said, even if in a worst case scenario, only NF's interest was real, so what, straight up pass. Don't be stupid. It was not an acceptable situation. You literally just saw Leeds annihilate the transfer value of McKennie, and Aaronson, and derail Marsch's career, why on earth are you going to the latest crap version of Leeds, Norwich, Sunderland etc...Hell no. Just force Dortmund to pay you for splinters for 5 months then pick your choice. Instead you went with the Leeds "destroy your transfer value" strategy. Terrible.
Gio didn't get many minutes at Forest. But the flip side is he didn't do much to earn more time either.
Sevilla is one club under significant financial constraints at the moment. So if Dortmund was looking for a team to pay Reyna's full salary, it was less likely going to be Sevilla. Marseille has some FFP issues. I mean, last year Sevilla just said "take everyone" to the football world. Sevilla 'transfer list entire squad' due to 'huge €90m debts' (sportbible.com)
BVB conditioned any loan on Gio signing that extension. So it was loan + 1 year extension vs. status quo and go into the last year of the contract.
I know Gio is someone special, up there in the Pulisic tier. He's coming to Copa with a chip on his shoulder too. I want him to feel embraced by the NT fans. I want him to know we have faith in him, that he's going to prove he's a very good player, whatever the struggles right now.
Many of our players have used the recent national team as an oasis when having a bad time at their clubs. Pulisic, McKennie etc. Reyna has always looked good for us when at least somewhat healthy. I think this is a big reason why the players wanted Berhalter back because they don't want a life draining coach with the national team too they want to relax, hang out with buddies and play. I suspect in 15-20 years some players will open up more. So the question is would the team be better with a great coach but the players don't like him or what they have now? There's a good argument for team chemistry being more important than tactics.
Oh yeah. While I don't think Berhalter is a great coach, he may be a great fit. I bet the day BigSoccer gets their way and we get Klopp or someone like that, we flop like a Magikarp.
He's not in the Pulisic tier. He could be if he shakes free of his parents and starts putting it together, but that doesn't appear to be happening anytime soon. It may never happen. The best thing that some fans can do for him is to shut the F up. They can stop the act that he is slighted by the usmnt when he clearly is not. If he doesn't play when and where the Stan fans want, the best they can do is to shut the F up and can the drama. Feeding his head with drama is obviously toxic for him. In my opinion its what made him think that he is better than he really is and led to his problems getting minutes. If he hasn't figured out that he hasnt earned jack sh*t yet then he needs to learn that right now or things won't go well for him in 2026. Humility will do a ton of work for him if he lets it. Here's reality...if he struggles at Dortmund again, we're looking at a loan to MLS before the world cup.
Yeah those were certainly the favorites for landing spots. Nottingham paid the money too and thats probably the primary mover. The realistic financing teams hes been linked to in the past are Fiorentina and Ajax. I dont know much about either's clubs player situation at Gios position, but I know Fiorentina is increasingly proficient at getting guys like Gio and flipping them for big stacks. Ajax has been good at it until very recently. For Serie A, Id love to see either Fiorentina or Napoli make a move for him. Only french team right now besides PSG who could make a splash for him right now is Monaco, and that could be slightly interesting too.