Weston McKennie, who was suspended from Sunday’s match against Canada and sent back to Juventus on Monday for violating U.S. team rules, has dominated the conversation around the USMNT for the last 48 hours.
On Tuesday, one day ahead of a suddenly-crucial qualifier at Honduras, the discussion around the 23-year-old midfielder reached a new level, with details emerging about the nature of the violation that prompted head coach Gregg Berhalter to send McKennie packing. ESPN reported that the 23-year-old spent a night outside of the team’s coronavirus bubble while in Nashville ahead of the Canada game and confirmed a TUDN report that he brought an unauthorized individual into his hotel room inside the bubble on a different evening. A source confirmed to The Athletic that McKennie did break COVID-19 protocol on two separate occasions, but didn’t go into the specifics of his actual violations.
Berhalter and U.S. Soccer haven’t gone into detail about the specifics of McKennie’s offense. He only said that he violated the team’s COVID-19 protocols in a statement posted to his Instagram on Sunday.
“When you talk about team policies and team rules and what we’re trying to accomplish as a team, the team absolutely comes first,” Berhalter said. “And we made this decision not only for the short-term, but for the long-term health of the program. And it’s not an easy decision. Trust me, countless coaches are faced with decisions where they have to take talented players out of a lineup for some reason or another, but we did it for what we think is the good of the group and good of the team.