The director behind the new docuseries on the U.S. Men’s National Team has heard the backlash about glossing over the 2023 Reyna-Berhalter drama. But he tells Front Office Sports he’s standing behind his decision.
U.S. Against the World, the HBO docuseries from Getlin’s Park Stories, follows the USMNT from the 2022 World Cup through the lead-up to the 2026 tournament.
Last month, director and executive producer Rand Getlin told broadcaster Glenn Crooks why his documentary only briefly mentions the controversy. After former head coach Gregg Berhalter said he nearly sent Gio Reyna home from Qatar in 2022, Reyna’s mother, Danielle, subsequently reported to the federation an alleged domestic violence incident from the early 1990s that involved Berhalter and his wife.
U.S. Soccer conducted an investigation and reinstated Berhalter as coach, but later fired him in 2024 after the Copa América. Berhalter and Reyna’s father Claudio played together on the USMNT, and Gio is now teammates for the World Cup with Berhalter’s son, Sebastian.
The clip of Getlin’s explanation to Crooks went viral on social media. Many fans and media members questioned his reasoning for the subject’s exclusion from the five-episode series, and why even a few minutes wouldn’t have been enough to address it.
“Every time we would crack it open and try and expand on the idea, you’re like, ‘Well, you need more. And you gotta talk to more people, and you have to sit down and you have to figure out a way to continue building on this until it’s fully fleshed out and fair,” Getlin tells FOS.
“We decided to focus intensely on the human stories that existed within it, and we weren’t going to half-litigate an issue that required a lot of depth and nuance, and put in five minutes or ten minutes or fifteen minutes and take away from something, if it required hours in order to be fair.”
Getlin says it was ultimately his decision not to dive into the controversy, because “if we can’t do it fully and fairly, then let’s acknowledge it existed, which we did…and then we move on, because that’s not what this show is about.”
Reyna told reporters last week that he finds the topic of the controversy “a little bit tiring.” He added: “I understand the business and that these questions pop up, but yeah, I’m so far past that and I’m just looking forward to this World Cup.”
Building to 2026
Getlin also walked through the process of pitching the series, both to U.S. Soccer and streamers.
He says that after doing a short project on USMNT player Tyler Adams, his company and the U.S. Soccer Players Association approached the federation in early 2020 with the idea. Two years later, in May 2022, Getlin says they got a call to be on the road in two days for a month-long trip, and have been filming ever since.
But before Qatar, Hollywood doubted soccer’s viability for a U.S. audience, and every streaming platform passed on it, the director says.
Getlin says his team raised money to keep filming, and as the U.S. squad found success in Qatar, they started getting calls from the people who turned them down, eventually landing with HBO.
“Every time a World Cup comes up,” Getlin says, “we want to lead the country into that moment by helping them to recap the last four years of the journey, and get them bought in on the young American men who are going out there to try to do something special for us.”
The World Cup begins in Mexico on June 11, and the USMNT plays its first game of the tournament the following day in L.A. against Paraguay. The U.S. will also face Australia and Turkey in the group stage.
