NEARLY half the USA squad wanted to boot midfielder Gio Reyna OUT of the World Cup.
The Dortmund 20-year-old’s lack of action in Qatar was a mystery during the tournament.
But it has now emerged that Reyna’s team-mates were so angry at his behaviour and “alarming lack of effort” around the team camp in Doha that they held a VOTE to see if he should be sent home.
And while angry coach Greg Berhalter and his staff did not vote, Reyna was allowed to stay only after winning the ballot by the smallest margin of 13-12.
Berhalter revealed the scale of the turmoil when he said: “In this last World Cup, we had a player that was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field.
“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.
“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 apologise to the group, but it’s going to have to say why you’re apologising. It’s going to have to go deeper than just “guys, I’m sorry.”
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“And I prepped the leadership group with this.
“I said, ‘okay, this guy’s going to apologise to you as a group, to the whole team.
“And what was fantastic in this whole thing is that after he apologised, 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.”
