Giovanni “Gio” Reyna US National Team Discussion

Yeah he's not playing in 2026.

 

yeah we should dump all the hurt or untrendy guys who are also the reason the program peaked in about summer 21. the reason this was good c. summer 2021 was we'd finally swapped out all the GB early years junk and gotten pepi reyna adams robinson richards up the spine. and reyna specifically added a central creative element where everything didn't have to be a wide cross or dead ball goal.

between choices and injuries we have then worked nice and hard to dismantle the improved spine we had. hence the last 2 years of mostly trash.

what was it we started last game? sargent musah morris ream? not sure how anyone wants to encourage that kind of qualitative slippage.

but have at it.

 

At this stage, I would say it’s 25/75 based on his past.

For the World Cup, he doesn’t just have to be healthy. He has to be healthy and playing regularly in a way that warrants a call up.

The question is not whether or not he will be healthy at some point over that period, it’s whether or not he will have enough runway to get up to speed. He did not have enough runway last time. He hasn’t had enough runway since. Time is running out.

If he is not in form and playing in the coming Gold Cup, I would count him out unless he has a revelatory period before the cup that would justify taking him and his baggage into that 23. Remember, his last World Cup was arguably the biggest player meltdown we will ever see with the USMNT this side of John Harkes.

 

what you're missing is (a) dude foolishly extended out his deal just to go on loan (then back to a team that benched him, why did they need an extension for that) and (b) part of reyna's plight is he's too expensive for most of the type teams he needs to drop down to, to find his missing playing time.

if GR is $15-20m transfer value, that's about the record for a lot of holland. they don't buy. they develop and sell.

what you need is a thread the needle exit to some team that can spend $15-20m on a guy with promise but no sustained history starting, but themselves have room for him to start there easily.

 

this is boring. there is literally no rule anywhere that our starters have to be starting in club. there is plenty of history of jozy or dempsey or whatnot having good NT seasons while out of fashion at a club.

thanks for precisely setting out my "aaronson has more caps than weah" explanation in a bow. "let's start the guys who are busier at club." even if that's not the same as who the actual talent is. even if the talent may be signed at intense big clubs where playing time is premium and any PT at all says you are a bad a$$. we are dismissive of guys barely playing at dortmund. dortmund was in the effffing UCL final. we adore people playing at norwich. norwich lost to bristol last weekend.

the further this gets from finding the best talent to fit a scheme that makes us win games, the worse this is going to get.

the worst part is i think all the "but he scored 10 for norwich" arguments are basically fanboy fodder, hype for people who watch too much tv club soccer. if you watch just the US games you come out with a totally different idea who should play. and that's what US is playing, is the US games. they aren't playing preston north end tonight.

 

I've been saying he's MLS quality for awhile now.

He should go get his dad to talk MLS into having some team put in a discovery claim on him, and then use gam and tam and ysa to bring Reyna into the MLS fold.

 

It’s just as likely that there will be better options as it is likely that Reyna will be able to play. Cole Campbell is passing him up at Dortmund as we speak. If Campbell passes him up at Dortmund, he will pass him up with the USMNT as well.

 

is the idea here we're gonna do GB one better? like he managed to turn this into a one round and out team by benching one of his top attackers. who we clearly miss right now. so let's drop him.

and to underline how this is done in the abstract,
"for who?"

morris? musah? tillman? LDLT?

it's not like you're suggesting something clever like bringing in campbell -- who is another dortmund good guy.

are you people clinical?

 

Reyna has played “central” very little with the USMNT, and when he has he has not been very good. The Copa America was supposed to be the big “central” coming out party for Gio, and Gio was invisible over the tournament as the team crashed out.

Gio is a wing player.

 

y'all pigeonhole way too much. do you not see where GR could play 10 and campbell RF? these aren't one position guys. and it's not their fault if BD forces them in a foxhole together. we don't have to use them like that.

since when did we become the Follower team that just does whatever some club team does?

i would play different positions sometimes in college, or opposite sides in the back. i might play back in HS and wing in select. or back in college and mid in summer league. there may be a slight adjustment period but to me it was actually invigorating.

look at skillsets. look at our scheme. fit them together. quit trying to play dumb stats driven bs games. "oh, but his form is off." off form he probably outscores the rest of our MF put together. used wide reyna is probably slightly behind puli and weah for production.

spare me. this is crazed.

 

Meh, Reyna "dropped" himself, by rotting on the bench at his clubs, and by possessing a body made entirely out of glass.

No one else "dropped" him. He did it all by himself. (Not even his mommy, nor his daddy had any part in that.)

 

you follow "form" way too closely. the whole team had a copa nightmare. does that mean we return them all back to some old position?

if you go back and look at 23-24 from NL finals to copa, he had 4G 4A playing AM.

and you fail to realize that with reyna and puli wide, we get waaaaaay too slow to get out of our own end. you need someone with wide speed so we can get things going.

weah wide, reyna mid.

this also avoids this whole dumb discussion where weah ends reyna's NT career with them put same spot for 10 years, while i watching freaking LDLT morris aaronson musah and a bunch of other second rate MF play reyna's slot.

to use your own words back, "are they central mids?" barely.

common sense is if you have a team with a few star players you don't deliberately stack the up at one position then bench everyone but one guy. how dumb is that.

the whole idea is get as much talent on the field at once as possible. reyna is talent. if we're even debating that then this is a pointless discussion.

 

i just explained how the 2 do not connect up. that reyna played well in the march NL finals, for example. plenty of history of out of fashion club players doing well for the US.

eg dempsey at spurs
eg jozy for about 4 years of wandering except AZ

conversely, i can call up 15 goal norwich wonder sargent 20 more times and he might score 1-2 NT goals against haiti or something.

you are pretending the 2 connect up when all evidence is to the contrary

you do have to quickly get him fit and sharp, but talent wins out. only dumb teams favor practice players over the talent. or supposed "form" guys from random dutch teams over "talent" guys at dortmund or CFC.

but then, we are where we are doing what we do.

 

He was outstanding playing centrally against Mexico in the NL semi.

 

to give a couple more recent disproofs, pulisic during his lame duck period at CFC was still good for us. and balogun was the one guy still scoring goals at copa while the rest collapsed (and with an assist on NZ recently) -- when to hear your gibberish he should be benched for his monaco situation.

you're simply wrong.

you either are offended you watched 90 minutes of dortmund to not see our guys play on tv, and want payback, or you don't get how it works.

 

Ancient.
Fvkcing.
History.

Whatever he did at some ginned up cashgrab played safely at home vs CONCACAF fodder in the past means exactly Jack and shyte, NOW.



Again, he's rotting on the bench, and he's a "Light Duty Commando."

 

see i think this gets into silliness. he can play both. but what resolves it all, is look at the roster, and where do we need help, and where can he start. he should be an immediate 10 starter unless we say move puli to the 10. better than anyone else we have at playmaking. period.

if i wanted to just mock people, as i spelled out, who the heck else at AM/10? musah? mckennie? they are turnover machines who crash a box. LDLT? soft. morris? 6. tillman? are we seriously saying row z finishing beats reyna?

meanwhile, weah can ball wide. if my XI needs work my instinct is not stack up subs, it's get talent on the field.

personally i want to see puli and reyna central, facing goal, balogun striker, and then put campbell and someone else wide. adams 6. an offense actually puts the fear of god in a team.

do people think this current unit scares anyone? not beyond the forwards. the MF is slop and turns it over half the time before our forwards can get it. the defense flat sucks, but that's what happen when you pick defenders on how you think they pass the ball. [we don't seem to get this isn't college and the other team might have neymar you actually have tp defend well.]

 

you're not worth listening to. dude about singlehandedly won the 21 and 23 NL. we don't have much recent silverware and that's like most of it right there. bright idea is get rid of the best player when you do manage to win. genius.

and you can mock concacaf but it's where we're playing like 80-90% of our games, so it is what it is. kind of like no sane uefa team that won euros recently or even 4 years ago behind a guy would ever be in a rush to drop them this fast on stupid club form theories. you watch too much tv.

and everyone having laughed at me proposing new guys like campbell, seems to laughably suggest you think we have better sitting around on, say, this roster, or guys like LDLT out hurt. which makes me giggle.

because, what, copa stunk? everyone did. weah got a red. turner looked bad. jedi looked bad. tell me someone who looked good.

this is a stomp fit posing as analysis.

 

Bad takes abound on this side of the board.

 

Really, the more important question is:

Who gives a shyte?

IOW, who gives a shyte about a cashgrab safely hosted at home, against CONCACAF fodder?


You may get your jollies watching shytty opposition play glorified friendlies in the US, but I want more for the program. I want to see the USMNT take on, and beat actual good opposition. And because of this, all CONCACAF cashgrabs are worth jack and shyte. They mean less than zero, insofar as judging a player's abilities.


Alas, since CONCACAF is all about the cashgrabs, its incumbent on the individual players to play "big boy" club soccer to test their mettle.


Again, since Reyna has been rotting on benches, how do we know if he's good at the game NOW? He's no longer employed as a professional soccer player. He's employed as a professional soccer game watcher.

 

Bad decisions by the Reyna family, too.

Playing in MLS >>>> rotting on benches.

 

He has to be healthy enough to make the bench before he can rot on it.

 

We can't be looking at the past because it's not the same coach. As soon as Poch got the job, it was a clean slate for every player. The first few camps are the most important camps. Poch is going to have his guys that will always be there no matter what.

We are 1 and a half years away from 2026 WC and Gio isn't ready yet. Someone said that
Eredivisie teams don't buy players. 15-20 million. Yes they do.
Pepi -11
Lozano- 15.
He doesn't need to get a transfer He could get a loan with the option to buy

 

I think he is too good of a player. There is still lots of playing time for him to get back in rhythm.
Now, if Pocho decides to play over the midfield (I doubt it) then I can see not making for a more, faster AM.

 

I'm good with Reyna continuing to feature for the USMNT as long as he provides value, which I think he does. But these examples aren't really analogous or all that responsive to posts about Gio rotting on the bench/injured list.

Dempsey started 32 matches in his one year at Spurs, including 22 Premier League matches. That's lower than he typically managed, but obviously still a decent amount of starting time.

Balogun started the majority of Monaco's Ligue 1 games last season, and 22 games across all competitions.

Pulisic started half of Chelsea's league games his first two seasons there (18-19 games), and 25+ games across all competitions. In his 3rd year there, he had 13 league starts and 21 starts across all competitions. It was really only his final season there that he was anything less than a rotational player.

Jozy never really went more than a single year in his career without at least being a rotational player either. He ended up at AZ exactly 3 seasons after he transferred to Europe from MLS, and he started 16 Premier League games during the 2nd of those 3 seasons, just before the World Cup.

Gio had 6 league starts +1 cup start in 21/22, 4 league starts + 3 CL starts in 22/23, and 3 league starts + 1 cup start last season in 23/24. A lot of that is injury related. But you're just not going to find too many players who have managed to play a positive, meaningful role for the USMNT after 3+ years of playing that little at the club level. Frankie Hejduk (as a last minute emergency option at LB) in the 2002 World Cup and Benny Feilhaber (as a supersub) in the 2009 Confederations Cup come to mind as two exceptions. But I'm struggling to think of others in that category prior to this cycle. Gio is now another exception, and maybe that's fine. But he is nonetheless an exception.