HBO is getting soccer fans hyped for the World Cup with a documentary miniseries about the last four years of the U.S. Men’s National Team’s journey to hosting the 2026 World Cup.
The documentary is titled U.S. Against the World: Four Years with the Men’s National Soccer Team. The five-part series is releasing new episodes weekly and premiered on May 12. It begins at the 2022 World Cup, where the USMNT qualified for the Round of 16 before being defeated by the Netherlands.
The other four parts talk about the 2024 Copa America and the firing of Gregg Berhalter, the hiring of Mauricio Pochettino, the 2025 Gold Cup, and finally the naming of the 2026 World Cup roster.
However, the documentary inexplicably does not focus on one of the biggest stories surrounding the USMNT across those four years — the drama surrounding former manager Berhalter and star player Gio Reyna.
To refresh your memory, Berhalter sat Reyna on the bench at the 2022 World Cup in a limited role after struggles with injury and his career failing to take off in Europe. While Gio Reyna did not handle the benching well, it exploded months later when his parents Danielle and Claudio (a former Berhalter teammate with the USMNT in their playing days) reported a domestic violence episode involving Berhalter and his wife from their college days in retaliation over their son’s playing time. Berhalter was cleared and returned to the team as head coach and stayed until the summer of 2024.
The scandal rocked U.S. Soccer as two families who were longtime friends and had been intertwined with the program for multiple generations had a falling-out that became national news. It’s probably deserving of its own documentary series.
However, director Rand Getlin found it undeserving of attention in his HBO series about the last four years of the USMNT. In an interview with NYCFC broadcaster Glenn Crooks, Getlin said that the drama was just too complex to cover in the series.
“Life happens, and you make decisions on where you’re going to spend your time,” Getlin said. “The reality is for, and we mentioned we’re trying to super-serve U.S. Soccer fans of course, but more importantly probably for the sport and the trajectory of the sport in America, we have to get people from outside the tent that have no idea what’s been happening with this team ever, let alone that specific chapter.”
“There’s no doubt it’s a massive, meaningful chapter in the story of this U.S. Men’s National Team. The question is, is this the right vehicle to tell that story? And the answer is absolutely not. This is a team story that we’re running through. Episode one is 2022 World Cup, episode two is 2024 Copa, episode three is the transition to Pochettino, the 2025 Nations League after he had taken over, episode four is the 2025 Gold Cup, and episode five is everything after Gold Cup up til kickoff basically.”
While the HBO series definitely has a defined arc around those tournaments and milestones, there is no mandate that it follow a rigid structure for those moments. If HBO has a blank canvas from the last four years to work from around the USMNT, it’s obvious that the Reyna-Berhalter story is number one on the list of things that simply have to be covered.
But according to Getlin, that wasn’t the case for this series because it would simply take too much work to tell the story and do it justice.
“You don’t have time to dig into this situation because it’s too complex. If we were going to do it right, I started my career as an investigative journalist. I’ve got a law degree. I take journalism very seriously. If I was going to do that story and we were going to spearhead that, you’re talking a multi-hour investigative series. And the reason for that is you need to talk to the Reynas, you got to earn their trust to get them to speak about it candidly. You need to talk to the Berhalters, earn their trust, get them to talk about it, speak about it candidly. You got to go talk to the kids, you got to go talk to all the people around them. You got to go talk to the reporters. You got to make sure that you talk to US Soccer. Right? Think about what it would actually take to do that story justice,” Getlin added.
While you might understand where the HBO director is coming from, that’s not an excuse to gloss over the Reyna-Berhalter drama if you’re attempting to tell the story of the 2022-2026 U.S. Soccer program. It also raises the question: if not HBO, Getlin, and this series, then who else will tell the story, given the unique access they had to everyone throughout US Soccer over this period? Gregg Berhalter and Gio Reyna are already featured in the documentary anyway. To add to the current layer, Reyna and Berhalter’s son, Sebastian, is now a teammate on the 2026 World Cup squad.
Excluding that story is just one more example of sports documentaries taking the easy way out and rapidly losing any true value. HBO could have added a sixth episode to tell the full story if it wanted to keep the remainder of the story arc intact. They could have done literally anything to address it, but made the conscious editorial choice not to do so.
If Getlin and HBO are willing to exclude that story, what other inconvenient truths were left on the cutting room floor? Acknowledging that some stories are too complicated to tell is an admission that viewers aren’t getting the real story because it’s too complicated and messy. Once upon a time, that’s what sports documentaries were for. Now they are just public relations tools. If you’re only making this film to make U.S. Soccer fans feel good about themselves, you might as well create a narrative where the U.S. is the favorite to win the World Cup.
The first words of the HBO trailer say, “It’s been a crazy four-year journey, the cameras have seen everything.” But that access is only as good as what you do with it.
About Matt Yoder