Giovanni “Gio” Reyna US National Team Discussion

Gio is fantastic i love that he is one of the first subs on. I was commenting more from club perspective and of course it isnt any individual singular trait. LMAOOOOO

 

I think there are only 2, off the top of my head, at this tournament. Kane and Haaland. The rest are either not quite elite or some kind of positional hybrid.

CBs have a 15 yard head start.

 

Kane tends to drop deep and link up play. He's as much a false 9 as a real 9.

Haaland is a pure old fashioned center forward.

 

Any ideas guys?

The calendar is undefeated. No outfield player has ever defined a
World Cup at 39, and Argentina will have to ration his minutes
whether they like it or not.
https://wcup-spot.com/messi-world-cup-record-why-it-wont-happen

 

Yes, they obviously haven't been following Messi since he left Barca.

 

This could go in multiple threads but I choose this one because it seems active. In any case, it’s a great read from what seems like a fresh voice on the scene. Give Nic a follow for more goodness. Caveat: YMMV

https://t.co/VamKUyajUO

— Nic Agüero (@ClawForThatInch) June 15, 2026

 

Hm. Xitter article

 

Unrecognized URL.

 

Wow, that's a really poor argument. That writer is trying to say something unique, and in doing so looks like a complete idiot. I'll paraphrase: "And, yeah, he's tied now for most goals scored in a WC, after scoring 3 in the opening match, but he definitely won't score again".

 

I only learned after Gio's goal that hitting the ball with the outside of the foot like that is called a "trivela". Since then, I've seen a lot of people talk about how difficult it is. My dad taught me to strike the ball like that when I was little, and until I quit playing it was a regular part of my game. Every game. I don't find it to be difficult (but it sure can be fun!). Why do so many people seem to think it's some really difficult skill? To me it's just as easy as striking with the instep or top of boot, just applicable in different circumstances.

 

Worked for me. Hmmmm. Sometimes this forum is weird about embeds. Here is the text:



The Hardass We Needed








Nic
@ClawForThatInch
·
Jun 15

The ball left Gio Reyna's foot wrong. That's the strange thing about the trivela, the strike with the outside of the boot that bends a ball against its will. It looks like a miskick right up until it doesn't. 70,000 people at SoFi watched a kid who'd spent 3 years cast as the problem hit a ball with the part of his foot you're taught never to use, in the 8th minute of stoppage time, and watched it curl past the keeper into the side netting.
Then Mauricio Pochettino ran.
Not the dignified manager fist-pump. He came off the technical area at a full sprint toward a substitute who'd been on the field 16 minutes, arms wide. That sprint is the story. A coach with a reputation for being hard to love, running to celebrate the exact player the last regime tried to send home.
What they did to the kid
Qatar, 2022. Reyna plays 52 minutes across an entire World Cup. Berhalter tells him before the opener his role will be "very limited," and the kid does what gifted 20-year-olds who've been told they're special their whole lives tend to do. He sulks. He mopes through a training scrimmage. He's a brat about it.
That part's on Gio, and he's mostly admitted as much. Here's the part that isn't. Berhalter could have handled it in the room, in private, the way you handle your own. Instead he flew home and stood up at a leadership summit, one on moral leadership of all things, and described a player who "was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field." A player they were "ready to book a plane ticket home" for. He thought the room's rule of silence would protect him.
It didn't. The story was out within hours, and every soccer fan in America knew the unnamed kid by name before dinner. A coach had taken a private failure and turned it into a parable for executives. Whatever you call that, it isn't leadership.
What followed was worse, and you lived through it, so I won't walk the whole timeline. The 2 mothers who'd been best friends for 30 years. The phone call. The 1992 incident pulled out of the past. The lawyers and the word "blackmail." The whole sport got a tour of the basement that winter.
But one detail tells the real story better than the scandal does. Claudio Reyna, Gio's father, had the sporting director's cell number, and used it. Texted him during matches. Had been reaching out for years, a "pattern of periodic outreach" the independent report called it, which witnesses described as "bullying." That's the water American soccer swam in. Fathers and sons, mentors and protégés, best men at each other's weddings. Arena to Bradley to Berhalter, the program handed down like a family business among men who'd known each other for decades.
A closed loop. Gio Reyna was a casualty of its politics at least as much as his own immaturity. The system that built him is the same one that turned on him.
Enter the hardass
Here's something the American game has spent 20 years pretending isn't true. Soccer is a poor kid's sport that the United States turned into a rich kid's hobby. Everywhere else on earth the game grows out of dirt. You learn it barefoot on a lot full of broken glass and splinters and a ball that's more tape than leather, and you learn it mean, because the kid across from you is playing for something and you can see it in his eyes. That's where the art comes from. The hunger underneath it.
The U.S. flipped that on its head. Here it's $3,000 club fees and travel tournaments and parents in folding chairs filming highlight reels for college recruiters. Manicured fields, matching kits, a trainer for this and a specialist for that. We took the poorest kids' game in the world and made it a country club for the comfortable, then wondered why the product came out soft. Pretentious. Entitled. Allergic to the part of the game that actually hurts.
So U.S. Soccer, bleeding credibility after getting bounced from its own Copa América in the group stage, did something it rarely does. It went outside the family. It needed hedge-fund money to do it, because the federation couldn't cover the salary on its own, and hired Pochettino at 6 million a year. Third-highest-paid international manager on the planet, behind only England and Brazil.
And here's the thing about the man they bought. He came up the exact way the American kids didn't. Murphy, Argentina, a speck on the pampas a couple hundred miles from Buenos Aires, where his father Héctor was a farm laborer and the family watched the 1978 World Cup on a black-and-white set powered by a battery pulled off the tractor. No luxuries, his own word for it. Kicked a ball around the farmyard with his brothers until a scout found him in the dirt at 14. That's the man U.S. Soccer imported to fix the rich kids. A guy who learned the game where it's still poor and still means something, sent in to break the soft entitlement out of a generation that never had to bleed for any of it.
And Pochettino is, by most accounts, hard to play for.
I mean that as a compliment. He runs players into the ground and doesn't apologize for it. Dispute his authority and he pushes back harder, on purpose. At Espanyol, Pablo Osvaldo said the man worked you like a dog, that "sometimes you feel like killing him but it works." The night his Spurs team finished one of the great Champions League comebacks in Amsterdam, the biggest night of those players' careers, he wouldn't let them have a beer on the flight home. No you're training tomorrow, he told them. Up at 9. The miracle doesn't buy you a day off.
That's the man. A disciple of Bielsa, the prophet who once turned up at young Pochettino's house in the middle of the night, woke the 13-year-old, and looked at his legs before deciding he'd be a footballer. Demanding to the edge of cruelty, indifferent to whether you like him on Monday.
The lazy version of this story writes itself from there. Hardass meets fragile kid, buries him deeper than Berhalter ever did.
That's not what happened.
Why the hardass loves the kid
Pochettino called Reyna a "very special talent." Named him to the World Cup roster off almost nothing, 137 minutes and a single goal all season at Mönchengladbach, and when reporters questioned it he said the kid can help and moved on.
Here's what the cliché misses. Berhalter's regime and Pochettino's are not the same kind of tough. Berhalter's was soft where it should have been hard and hard where it should have been soft. It protected the politics, the back channels, the 30-year friendships, then made an example of a confused kid in front of strangers. It guarded the system and spent the player.
Pochettino runs it the other way. He's merciless about the only thing that matters to him, the work, and he does not care about your last name or your father's caps or who made what phone call. "No one's special" is the whole ethos. That sounds cold until you sit with it, because in the old culture everyone connected was special, and being special was a currency, and the currency was rigged. Poch doesn't trade in it. You don't get minutes because of your bloodline and you don't lose them because of your mother. You play because you earned it on the grass in front of him.
A demanding coach who only cares about effort turns out to be the safest place in the world for a kid who got chewed up by everything except effort. The hardass doesn't do politics. He does work. And the work is the one thing Gio Reyna can control.
Reyna, asked to compare the 2 men, kept it diplomatic. Both "demanding," he said, Poch's culture "a little looser," with fewer of Gregg's rules. Read what a careful young man chooses not to say. One regime ran on rules and grudges. The other runs on standards and sweat. A kid can survive a standard. A grudge will follow him home.
The sprint
Back to SoFi. The ball hit wrong on purpose, and the Argentine coming across the white line like decorum had insulted him personally.
Reyna put his hands over his ears after it went in. He wouldn't explain it, called it an inside joke with his friends, and left it there. 3 years of noise would make a man want to cover his ears, sure. The leaked summit, the vote that may or may not have happened, the feud in every outlet, the failed loan at Forest, the shirt number handed to somebody else, the injuries that kept stealing him from himself the moment he found rhythm. He didn't say that's what it meant. He just plugged his ears and kept the reason to himself.
Then he asked for the ball, tucked it under his jersey, and stuck his thumb in his mouth. That one needs no translation. It's the oldest celebration in the sport. His wife is pregnant. He'd known for months and sat on it, and the moment he chose to tell the world was stoppage time in a World Cup opener on home soil, on a goal he scored with the wrong part of his foot, in front of a coach who'd staked his own name on him.
That's the part underneath the tactics and the salaries and the politics. A kid is about to become a father. The same kid whose own father texted sporting directors from the stands, whose mother's phone call helped end a coaching career. Reyna's about to take on the job the whole saga was quietly about all along. Raising someone. Deciding what gets passed down, and what doesn't.
The ceiling
Here's the flag I'll plant. Reyna's ceiling under Pochettino is higher than it's ever been, and it's higher precisely because the man is a cocky, uncompromising Argentine who measures you in effort and nothing else.
The talent was never the question. Youngest American ever to play in the Bundesliga, broke records Pulisic set, nicknamed the American Dream by Erling Haaland himself. What got in the way was everything around the talent. The politics, the entitlement, a soft culture that taught a generation of gifted American kids the game was about how you were managed, whether the coach was shielding you or settling a score.
Pochettino doesn't shield and he doesn't settle. He offers a standard and a stopwatch, the most honest deal in sports. Be the best version of yourself every day or sit down. I won't hold your hand and I won't stab you in the back, because I'm too busy and too sure of myself for either. For a kid who got wrecked by people paying too much attention to the wrong things, a coach who cares only about the ball is air.
That's the culture shift. Not the salary or the billionaires or even the 4 goals against Paraguay, the most the U.S. men have ever scored in a World Cup match. American soccer let go of the nice guy who ran a country club and hired the hard one who runs a meritocracy, and the hard one turned out to be the better thing for its most gifted and most wounded player.
Reyna spent 3 years thinking the threat was the press, the fans, the noise. It was the culture itself, the soft cozy rot of it. And the thing that finally cut through was a cocky Argentine in a quarter-zip who didn't care about any of it, running across a line at SoFi to get to a kid who hit a ball wrong and made it the most right thing anyone saw all summer.
His ceiling is limitless now. Not because someone finally protected him.
Because someone finally just made him work, and meant it, and ran to him when it paid off.

 

It was Jordan Morris’ go-to when he maybe shoulda used his left.

 

He's also pigeon-toed, which I imagine has something to do with the frequency of him striking the ball like that. We all know that he was very one-footed for a number of years, adding to that frequency for him.

 

with selfishness, comes responsibility

 

"You learn it barefoot on a lot full of broken glass and splinters and a ball that's more tape than leather, and you learn it mean, because the kid across from you is playing for something and you can see it in his eyes. That's where the art comes from. The hunger underneath it."

You know, that was true 40 years and it may still be true in poorer parts of the world but these days even the best kids, even in poor countries, are in academy systems by the time they're teens.

Take the US dual nats. Dest joined Almere City when he was 9, Jedi joined Everton aged 10 and Balogun was in Arsenal's academy from 7.

These kids didn't grow up kicking a hand sewn ball on a broken glass covered pitch, they had top quality coaching and all the benefits of a professional organisation from a very early age.

If you look at Moroccan, Algerian or Senegalese players its not much different.

 

Isn't one of the primary arguments made in Soccernomics that the idea of poor kids playing on the streets as the best way to develop talent is a myth?

I would say that is completely correct, and Soccernomics was published almost 20 years ago now.

 

Reyna has a very similar background to Erling Haaland. Both born in England to former Manchester City players. They played together at Borussia Dortmund. Why, in this writer's mind, is one hungry and one over-privileged? Probably has very little to do with environment.

 

Or Messi, who was with Newell's from 7.

Fun fact I learned from Leander's new book, Jedi's family was considering moving back to the States for a job, and Jedi getting into the Everton academy was what stopped them. Had they moved to the States, he'd have been less likely to ever play for the States.

 

Maradonna, Tevez and Mac Allister all played in the same absent academy from that age.

The kids kicking a tin can around on a glass covered piece of dirt are the ones that didn't make it.

 

I seem to recall an analysis that was done on the roster of the German team that won the 2014 World Cup, and it showed that the majority of players came from middle or even upper-middle class backgrounds.

 

USA midfielder Gio Reyna reveals his wife is pregnant during goal celebration

I’m told the unborn child’s hammie is already a bit tight and his delivery might be delayed a few weeks

 

I can't stand stuff like this where they create strawmen and such. Who exactly said "Gio is the problem"? The problem is Gio has gotten almost no playing time the last 2 years. That is a legit concern. Now fit is he? How many minutes can he play over the next few weeks are legit questions. Also, who do you bench to start him? I don't think he can provide the bite and defense Tillman brought last game so it's either McKinney or Dest. I don't think he's better than either of them.
And damn, watching Portugal vs Congo in the 49th minute. BOOM

Hate that I have to go to work in 1 hour.

 

That background and 1.5 Billion Euros spent by the DFB and Bundesliga 1 and 2 on youth development starting in 2002 for 10 years, or so. The reality. Very little street or schoolyard pickup games. Are we as a nation ready to invest in that kind of development? If not, pay-to-play will still dominate the youth landscape.
If there are 100 "free" boys academies with 150 players in each, that is about 1% of the approximately 1.5 million boys registered to play in the US.

 

Tyler Adams' mom drove him two hours each way after school to train with the Red Bulls.

That's the US equivalent of playing with a hand stitched ball on a field full of broken glass.