Giovanni Reyna’s Role Becomes Key Challenge for Mauricio Pochettino After USMNT Win

After the U.S. men’s national team’s 2-1 friendly win over Paraguay on Saturday, it’s beginning to feel like manager Mauricio Pochettino may be defined by the same challenge that undermined his predecessor:

Handling the enigma that is Giovanni Reyna.

Pochettino has been mostly consistent over his year-plus in charge that players need to earn national team minutes by being regular fixtures in their club sides, regardless of whether they’re playing in Europe, MLS or Latin America.

That’s presumably the reason why Yunas Musah hasn’t been seen since he reportedly declined an invite to join the 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup squad.

It’s likely why Matt Turner took the drastic step of making a summer return to his old starting job at the New England Revolution, departing the Premier League for an MLS side whose failure to reach the playoffs was all but certain by the time he arrived.

And it’s why Pochettino has extended a pathway for Cristian Roldan to regain his place in the squad following a strong showing for the Seattle Sounders at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup.

But the Argentine cut against that grain when he gave Reyna his first start since the 2024 Copa America against the Albirroja. And for 75 minutes, Reyna repaid that risk with arguably the best performance of the evening in a match that also included gifted Paraguayan Julio Enciso, scoring one goal and helping to set up another.

Reyna has always possessed enormous technical talent and ability. He also has spent the last several seasons on the fringes of his clubs, and still hasn’t played his way into regular starts despite a summer move from Borussia Dortmund to Borussia Monchengladbach. Yet again, a lower body injury has hindered his progress, the latest in a career full of them.

If anything, Reyna is on far shakier footing form-wise than he was three years ago, when inconsistency at the club and international level led Berhalter to inform the 20-year-old that his role would be limited at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Reyna’s response was so poor that Berhalter said he nearly dismissed him from the squad mid-tournament. And when Berhalter unintentionally made that ordeal public, it catalyzed an ugly saga involving both men’s families, and precipitated a U.S. Soccer investigation into a decades-old domestic incident between Berhalter and his now-wife Rosalind.

And at the time, the conventional wisdom suggested most of Reyna’s deficiencies were work-ethic related. Three years and lots of leg trauma later, it’s less clear whether Reyna’s problems are related to mentality or a decline in physical capabilities.

But there are sometimes players who become athletic liabilities at the elite club level who can excel even at the highest international levels. And as Pochettino wrestles with the idea that Reyna may be one of them, he has two advantages over Berhalter when he held the same position.

The first is the nature of his long-term ambitions. While the recent strong form of the U.S. squad has quieted questions about Pochettino’s buy-in, it’s still clear that the American job is a short-term gig. It would be stunning not to see the Argentine return to a high-level European club job after the summer of 2026, having already managed at Tottenham and Chelsea over the last decade. That’s in stark contrast to Berhalter, who very clearly wanted to remain in the U.S. job beyond Qatar.

It’s possible that Berhalter’s concern for his long term future -- and in particular, his ability to keep his players bought in for a second World Cup cycle -- made him more reluctant to lean heavily on Reyna in Qatar and risk alienating others who had been more consistent. Pochettino will carry no such baggage, having only to concern himself with the temperature in the U.S. changing room through next July.

Pochettino’s second advantage is that he’s already achieved positive results with some unconventional choices. Roldan has done far more good than bad in his return. Goalkeeper Matt Freese and defender Alex Freeman have performed like potential World Cup starters when they weren’t even in the picture a year ago.

Those kinds of successes -- which Berhalter had previous few of, despite his achievements in recruiting dual nationals to the U.S. fold -- give a manager more equity to borrow from when weighing a complicated decision like Reyna’s future role.