USMNT Manager Gregg Berhalter Earned A $900k Bonus For Accomplishing The Bare Minimum
Gregg Berhalter helped lead - if you want to call it that - the USMNT to the round of 16 in the 2022 World Cup and picked up a $900k bonus for doing so.
In other words, Berhalter did the absolute bare minimum that his job requires of him and earned a $900,000 check on top of his base salary of $1.3 million, according to published tax records.
With the bonuses he received for "both qualification and performance," Berhalter's earnings grew to nearly $2.3 million in 2022.
The USMNT making it out of the group stage and earning a spot in the knockout stage of the World Cup for the U.S. men's national team is not a goal, it's an expectation. A bonus for meeting that expectation is all fine and well, but that $900k figure is astronomical compared to others.
USWNT manager Vlatko Andonovski had a base salary of $396,089 in 2022 while earning a $15,000 bonus for his performance, which included consistently having the women's team ranked among the Top 3 in the world rankings.
Andonovski and the USWNT were a major disappointment in the 2023 Women's World Cup, but they did advance to the Round of 16. The 2023 tax records for the USMNT and USWNT will not be released until next year.
While the differences in salaries and bonuses are nothing to write off, Berhalter nearly doubling his earnings by simply doing what is asked of him as manager is shocking to see on paper.
Then again, this is the USMNT we're talking about, so it shouldn't come across as too big a shock.
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Berhalter's contract expired at the end of 2022 and was not renewed following an investigation into a domestic abuse incident involving his now-wife over 30 years ago.
After what turned into a long, drawn-out process to appease to the woke crowd looking to cancel Berhalter, the USMNT offered him a new contract that runs through 2026. It's safe to say that the U.S. Soccer Federation didn't exactly want to let a man they recently wrote a $900,000 check to unless it was a major issue.
Berhalter is 41-14-12 as the USMNT manager and will be tasked with leading the team into their biggest World Cup in team history when the tournament comes to North America in 2026.