‘Things have changed’ – Gio Reyna is ready to tell a new story as USMNT star looks to leave old questions behind at the 2026 World Cup
There was a point where Reyna just decided to stop scrolling. The decision to do so was easy. He deleted Instagram from his phone and decided that his time could be better spent elsewhere: talking to family, sitting with his dog, playing the PGA Tour video with his U.S. Men’s National Team teammates – literally anything but mindlessly staring at the phone. During those scrolling sessions, it became harder and harder to avoid seeing what was being said. Whenever his name popped up, in headlines or social media comments, the same sort of discussions always followed.
Reyna’s reputation has been debated and dissected plenty of times over the last three and a half years. It’s the one thing that everyone always wants to know about. Is he who social media says he is? Did it all happen the way we read? Is he fit? Is he confident? Do people like him? Does he care? Does he feel he has more to prove? Is everything that everyone’s assumed about him actually true?
Some is, he can admit. Like all stories, the ones about Reyna have morphed out of control over the years, spiraling in ways he never could have imagined. They did begin somewhere, though, and those beginnings are worth acknowledging. The other parts? They’re worth laughing about.
“I feel like a lot of the noise around me can tend to be that I’m a little bit of a hothead and, maybe, that I have attitude problems,” Reyna says as if he’s setting things up for a swift denial.
Not quite. He cracks a smile as he continues: “I think if you ask a lot of these guys on this team, there are, at times, moments on the field where I can be a hothead, for sure.”
Not a hothead in the traditional sense, mind you. The term can be used negatively, and it has been used that way plenty of times. Reyna, as he has said many times before, took it too far during one particular week in Qatar. Now, though, he takes a second to try to reclaim it. Gone is “hothead,” and in comes “passionate.” It’s a slight shift, but a significant one.
“I feel like part of it is that it’s something you need to be successful in the sport,” he says of his own ego and passion, which, again, have been the center of debate for his entire adult life. “You need to have that self-drive and that hunger and that fire. You need to keep going. Off the field, though? I feel like I’m very centered and very rational, yeah.”
Part of being rational is accepting reality. Reyna knows his. He knows that there are still plenty out there eager to hold the 2022 World Cup over him. Some people will define everything he does by how he handled the worst days of his professional career. Even as his life evolved, that moment will remain a chapter, one that can’t be erased.
It can be moved past, though. Perhaps even overshadowed, if all goes well. The reality is, though, that reputations are hard to shed. Reyna knows this.
“I feel like I’m definitely way less of a problem to the team than maybe people have thought in the past,” he says with a laugh. “I feel like that probably stems from that story more than anything, but I think I’m a team player. I enjoy being with this group of guys. I’m probably less of a problem for coaches than people think.
“People think I just walk in every day and everyone looks, but no, I’m pretty normal. I just want to do my best and help my team.”
One thing that Reyna has made clear time and time again is that this team, the USMNT, means everything to him. He was raised to love it, and he never fell out of love. For him, though, it’s not just a program, a status, or a soccer team; it’s deeper than that.
