Gregg Berhalter draws cheers from his fellow coaches in his return to the public spotlight

CHICAGO ― The hall where Gregg Berhalter spoke Friday at the United Soccer Coaches convention was packed to the gills 10 minutes before he took the stage. But the buzz in the hundreds-deep crowd offered no hints about how the former U.S. men’s soccer team manager would be received.

Were they there to applaud him? Or were they from the chorus that howled for his firing last summer, or after the Gio Reyna scandal following the 2022 World Cup? Or even earlier, given how many loud voices didn’t like him from the start in 2018?

The first of them, it turned out. Berhalter got a warm reception for his hour-long session, and there were no critics during a question-and-answer session he didn’t control. Before and after the event, he hosted long lines of attendees wanting to say hello and take pictures.

“Thank you, on behalf of everybody here, for everything you did with U.S. Soccer, with our men’s national team — we thank you for your service,” one attendee said during the Q&A, and loud applause ensued.

During his prepared remarks, Berhalter went into great depth on the tactical philosophy he aims to use as the new manager of the Chicago Fire. He had a PowerPoint presentation of the kind that soccer coaches feast on: slides with spreadsheets, slides with graphics, slides with pie charts, slides with dots on soccer fields, and slides with video clips from his U.S. tenure.

There was humor along the way, as Berh­alter has always enjoyed. There were also some firm expressions of how he sees the bigger picture.

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“We’re in the professional sports business,” he said at one point. “It’s really about building athletes, building a team, that’s resilient, that is ready to compete, that competes with intensity, with passion. Understanding that you’re not always going to win every game, right? But you have that mindset that we’re competitive each and every training session.”

That was a key cause of his downfall from the national team: his players’ lack of consistent intensity, especially at key moments during last summer’s crash out of the Copa América.

“Another important one is owning the outcome,” Berhalter said, “The closer you become to people, I think, the less you hold them accountable. Because you’re worried about a friendship, you’re worried about the social interaction and I think that becomes an issue.”

If those words weren’t clear enough, he added more later when he said: “The message about accountability, I think, is important — particularly with the national team. When you work with the players for so long, for six years. You can’t forget that that’s still really important.”

That immediately brought the Reyna scandal to mind. Berhalter nearly expelled the young phenom from the 2022 World Cup squad on the eve of the tournament, when they were already in Qatar, for a lack of effort in practice. Berhalter kept that quiet until after the tournament, when he acknowledged it at an event he thought was off the record.

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The ensuing outcry torched decades-long friendships between the Berhalter and Reyna families. An independent investigation detailed how Gio’s father Claudio, a legendary former player, had threatened to expose a past incident of violence by Gregg toward his future wife, Rosalind. It also revealed how Claudio tried to meddle in national team affairs on his son’s behalf — at some points lobbying another former teammate, then-U. S. Soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart.

All the drama threatened to torpedo the national team program as it started the journey toward the 2026 World Cup on home soil. Berhalter was out of his job for most of 2023, then returned after the investigation cleared him of guilt. He and Gio eventually patched things up, but results cost Berhalter his job.

The chorus of critics brayed throughout, and some still simmer today. But at this point, that chapter is finally closed. Now there’s space to respect what Berhalter did right: winning games, recruiting dual-national stars, and returning the USMNT to the World Cup after failing to qualify for 2018.

“From my experience, all the people that I interact with are positive people, and receptions in general have been very positive,” he said in a chat with the media afterward. “I think there’s an undercurrent online and on the Twitter-sphere, or Instagram-sphere, or whatever sphere, that doesn’t represent reality, necessarily. And the reality is that a lot of people were very proud of the time, they’re very supportive of the time, and that’s nice to hear validated now.”

Berhalter knew when the critics were out there, of course. He knew how much of a spotlight he was in, and the hazards that came with it. That was true Friday as it was on the night of his last U.S. game in July. He had his pride, too, then and now, but he kept his dignity as a person amid his dismissal.

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“I’m not complaining anything about it,” he said. “It is what it is, it’s the nature of the times. But what I would say is, I don’t think it’s a representation of reality. … Everywhere I am — at airports, places like this — people come up to me with a ton of positivity, thanking us for the time and how the team has progressed and grown. So that makes me feel good.”

Joining the Fire was an easy move for Berhalter, who already lived in Chicago thanks to his U.S. Soccer work. (The governing body has long been headquartered there, though it’s soon moving to a new national training center in suburban Atlanta.) And it was an easy call for the Fire, who’ve bounced around a slew of coaches in recent years. The club hired Berhalter to be not just its head coach, but its “director of football” — a higher position in the front office than sporting director Gregg Broughton.

They have a lot to do. Chicago used to be a preeminent MLS city, but the Fire’s glory days — when players included former Union manager Jim Curtin — are now long in the past. The club hasn’t made the playoffs in eight years, hasn’t gone past the first round in 16, and hasn’t won a trophy since the 2006 U.S. Open Cup that Curtin played in.

Berhalter’s work started with signing one of Curtin’s stalwart players at the Union. When Jack Elliott was cast off into free agency, a casualty of Jakob Glesnes’ guaranteed contract for this year, the Fire pounced within days.

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“He’s arguably one of the top five centerbacks over the last five years” in the league, Berhalter said. “To get a guy like that, in still the prime of his career for a centerback, we’re really excited about it. That was the first piece we actually added, and we’re really excited about the impact he can have not only on the field, but in the locker room.”

And if Elliott takes the field with a point to prove to his old team, that’s no bad thing either. In his farewell to the Union on Instagram last month, he noted he was “disappointed to announce” he was leaving Philadelphia, and that “the time has come where I have to stay true to myself and know my own worth.”

Any coach would gladly take a player with that on his mind.

“Everyone has a point to prove, right?” Berhalter said. “When don’t you have a point to prove?”

He didn’t say if that applied to himself, too. But on a day like this, he didn’t have to.