Gio Reyna apologized to his United States teammates leading up to their opening match of the World Cup due to a lack of intensity in a scrimmage against Qatari club Al Gharafa SC.

The lack of effort was so pronounced that it was unclear whether Reyna was protecting against an injury or just frustrated that he was not set to be a starter against Wales.

Reyna threw his shin guards after not being subbed in during the Wales match and his lack of effort continued again during a subsequent training session.

The situation became untenable and it had to be addressed multiple times until he finally apologized.

Reyna stood up before a video session and apologized to his teammates for his initial lack of intensity and said he understood he was part of a collective group. 

Within the team, the issues ended there.

“In this last World Cup, we had a player that was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field,” Gregg Berhalter said. “One of 26 players, so it stood out. As a staff, we sat together for hours deliberating what we were going to do with this player. We were ready to book a plane ticket home, that’s how extreme it was. And what it came down to was, we’re going to have one more conversation with him, and part of the conversation was how we’re going to behave from here out. There aren’t going to be any more infractions.

“But the other thing we said to him was, you’re going to have to apologize to the group, but it’s going to have to say why you’re apologizing. It’s going to have to go deeper than just, ‘Guys, I’m sorry.’ And I prepped the leadership group with this. I said, ‘OK, this guy is going to apologize to you as a group, to the whole team.’ And what was fantastic in this whole thing is that after he apologized, they stood up one by one and said, ‘Listen, it hasn’t been good enough. You haven’t been meeting our expectations of a teammate and we want to see change.’ They really took ownership of that process. And from that day on there were no issues with this player.

“As a coach, the way you can deal with things most appropriately is going back to your values. Because it’s difficult to send a player home. It was going to be a massive controversy. You would have been reading about it for five days straight. But we were prepared to do it, because he wasn’t meeting the standards of the group, and the group was prepared to do it as well.”