U.S. Soccer Doesn’t Expect Decision on Gregg Berhalter Until Summer

Cindy Parlow Cone, the president of U.S. Soccer, said the organization would employ an outside consulting firm to conduct a wholesale review of its team structure. The new developments, she said, meant the team could be without a sporting director and coach until the end of the summer. Berhalter, she said, remained “a candidate” to coach the national team, but the loss of two key decision makers and the end of his contract — with no end in sight for the investigation — almost certainly will mean the end of his tenure. A U.S. Soccer spokesman confirmed that Berhalter “is no longer a U.S. Soccer employee.”

“We did not plan it this way,” Cone said Thursday. “We find ourselves in this position, and we’re going to take the opportunity to really do a deep dive on our sporting side to make sure we’re as effective and as efficient as possible, because we have grand vision of where we want to go on the sporting side, and we want to make sure we’re in the best position to accomplish those goals.”

Stewart, who is taking a job at the Dutch club PSV Eindhoven, will stay with the organization through the middle of February. McBride will depart at the end of this month. Both men were former national team players and former teammates of Berhalter.

Cone said that the departures were unrelated to the ongoing investigation of Berhalter, which was triggered when Danielle Reyna, the mother of the star wing Gio Reyna, informed Stewart that Berhalter had hit his wife in an incident in 1991, when the two were dating during college.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/26/sports/soccer/us-soccer-berhalter-stewart-mcbride.html