USMNT’s Weston McKennie: ‘Everyone doubted me… but look at me now’ — The Athletic 20/6/24
By Adam Crafton
Weston McKennie summons the pain, transporting his mind to
December 2022 and the United States men’s national team’s round-of-16 exit from
the World Cup against the Netherlands.
“In a tournament,” he explains, “You have a lot of hope, and
within the team, we are family. These are people you grow up with, sharing the
same dreams, pushing each other, holding each other accountable and you build a
bond. There are photos of us after the game up in the stands crying with our
families and crying with each other.
“(The World Cup cycle) is like going to college with a buddy
for four years. You make it to graduation and realise we’re going to go our
separate ways — you’re going to have your life, I’m going to have my life. But
in this case, we have another shot at this and we’re going to do everything
that we can to not feel this same way again. You have the World Cup, Olympics
and Copa America — they are the big tournaments. And Copa is one where we can
showcase what we’ve learned.”
When the USMNT meet up at camp, coach Gregg Berhalter greets
them with a diagram, lit up on a projector, that shows a zigzagging road
through to the home World Cup in 2026.
“It has a bus and shows where we’re stopped at that moment,”
McKennie says. “That’s a great picture because it shows all these things are
preparing us for 2026 but the bus is stopped here right now and we have to make
the most of this moment.”
For McKennie, now 25, Copa America also provides another
opportunity to continue a personal redemptive arc after his career, in his own
words, edged to its “lowest point” during a loan spell in the Premier League
with Leeds United in the second half of the 2022-23 season.
The first half of that campaign had continued McKennie’s
steady progress, regularly starting for Juventus in Serie A and the Champions
League, before heading to Qatar for the World Cup. In January 2023, McKennie,
who also played in Germany for Schalke between 2017 and 2021, continued his
European tour, joining Leeds United on loan as Juventus handled the fallout of
financial investigations and point deductions within Serie A.
The deal included an option to make McKennie’s transfer
permanent that summer, with a fee agreed in the region of £30million ($38m) for
a player who had made 24 Champions League appearances. At Leeds, then coached
by Jesse Marsch, he formed part of a growing American contingent alongside
USMNT team-mates Tyler Adams and Brenden Aaronson.
Yet it turned into a calamity and McKennie was by no means
alone in struggling. He made 19 Premier League appearances, of which Leeds won
only three. His 16 starts included 4-1 defeats against Bournemouth and
Tottenham Hotspur, a 5-1 loss against Crystal Palace and a 6-1 drubbing by
Liverpool. Within a week of McKennie moving to Leeds, Marsch had been sacked,
and they were relegated from the Premier League in May.
“My time at Leeds was probably one of my lower points, if
not the lowest in my professional career,” says McKennie. “I always look at the
positive because I was at Juventus, playing week in and week out, and maybe I
developed a little bit of comfortability or complacency, knowing I was going to
play on the weekend. By going to Leeds and having the performance that I had
there and the way that it just turned out in general — four coaches in five
months (Marsch was replaced by interim coach Michael Skubala, then Javi Gracia
and Sam Allardyce took over), just nothing going to plan or how I imagined it.”
Although McKennie’s deal included an option for Leeds to
make the move permanent, he says he had aspirations of a return to Champions
League football in the event he excelled at Elland Road.
“When I went there, my head was more, ‘OK, I want to go
here, perform very well, put up numbers, help the team stay up and then
hopefully another Premier League team, top five, comes in and sees how well
I’ve played and then they would buy me’,” he says.
“With all the respect to Leeds and their fans, I love
Champions League football. I love playing at the highest level. Leeds was more
of a place I wanted to go to experience something new, the Premier League. But
there’s no better place to be seen by Premier League teams than if you’re
playing in the Premier League.
“I won’t be able to know what would have happened if Leeds
would have stayed up because it didn’t happen that way. Things turn out the way
they do for a reason. And now I’m exactly in the moment that I’m supposed to be
in.”
At Leeds, the atmosphere between the club’s supporters,
boardroom and players turned toxic. McKennie was caught in the crossfire.
“I like to think I’m someone that has a thick skin,”
McKennie says, his voice softening. “When you get little comments here and
there, it’s pretty easy to ignore. But then when you open up your phone and
always the first thing you see on social is something negative, it’s hard to
ignore it. I guess it’s hard for me because I do love it when people can relate
to me and I feel like I’m always a happy person.
“Football is a world where it’s sometimes unforgiving.
People obviously don’t know what football players go through and the stress
football players put on themselves to perform, because it’s not like we want to
perform badly. It’s not like we want to lose games. It’s just sometimes you
have ups and downs, so it hurts.
“It was probably the first time besides for the World Cup
exit where I cried, after the last game of the season at Leeds, when we
officially got relegated. I hate to lose and I felt like I really let down the
expectations that people had of me going there.”
He pauses briefly, before adding: “When people started
attacking me — me as a person in general, not even with football — everyone
knows that I’m more thick-boned than some other players, in that my body shape
is the way that it is. But when people started out saying, ‘You fat bast**d’
and ‘you pig’ and ‘you m*nkey’ and stuff like that, people don’t really realise
the effect that it has on people. I like to be happy and to make people happy,
to make people laugh. So that was a little bit hard.”
When the abuse turned personal, dehumanising and in some
cases racist, where did McKennie turn for support?
“Luckily, I had my personal chef, Patrick Contorno, who
works with me in Italy, and he was living over in England with me and I had my
assistant Charles also living with me.
“If you’re in a down mood in England, it can be hard to deal
with it because it’s also very bad weather most of the time. It’s rainy and
gloomy and it just sets the mood for you to already be in a sad mood. I had
those guys there with me and it helped a lot. If I was there alone, I would
have definitely gone into, like, a state of complete depression because I
wasn’t performing. I’m my own biggest critic.”
When McKennie returned to Juventus in the summer of 2023, he
found another challenge on his doorstep. He appeared, initially, to have been
written off, relegated into football’s version of the bomb squad.
“It wasn’t scary, or exciting (as a challenge),” he says,
“but it was familiar to the experience of being an American playing soccer for
a high-level club in Europe. It’s something that I feel like we all have to go
through when we go over to Europe. But I thrive off of it when I have to prove
myself again, because then it just makes me even more honest with myself in
terms of my efforts, my concentration. Something just clicks.
“It’s like a recipe. I know the ingredients to make it
happen and then I’m just… ‘boom’. Without doing any measurements of anything, I
can just throw it in. I know it’s going to taste good.
“I knew it was going to be (challenging). I didn’t know it
was going to be to that extent; where I didn’t have my locker, I didn’t have a
room in the hotel, I didn’t have a parking space. I changed in the locker rooms
with the academy kids, even when you had players in the main locker room who
had never played a game for Juventus because they’d always been out on loan.
And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I’ve only been gone for six months. I come
back and I am treated like this’.
“I couldn’t even get my shirt number (14), even though
nobody else had taken the number. I was like, ‘OK you guys want to treat me
like this? I’m just going to show you on the field’.
“I’m not someone that’s problematic. I don’t like to cause
problems. I don’t like uncomfortable situations. I don’t like drama. I just try
and let my football, my actions and my work ethic show everything about me,
because that’s when I feel like I’m at my best.”
McKennie’s revival began when he was invited to join the
squad on a money-spinning U.S. tour. It is tempting to wonder whether Juventus’
commercial team remembered at that point that they had a popular USMNT
midfielder on the books, but it was on the field, in performances against AC
Milan and Real Madrid, that McKennie reminded head coach Massimiliano Allegri
of his talents.
“It put me back in consideration. My job was to make that
decision much harder for them to make.”
He looks back reflectively on the turmoil at Leeds and
Juventus, however.
“It grounded me… what I’m most comfortable with and most
honest with is when I put my head down and work. That’s where I’ve had my
biggest success. I left Schalke and went to Juventus and nobody knew me.
Everyone doubted me. It’s too big of a club. I’ll never play. But look at me
now. Three and a half years later, more than 100 games for Juventus and I
played a majority of those games. I thrive when my back’s against the wall and
everyone’s doubting me. That’s how I became the player I was.”
Last season, McKennie made 29 starts for Juventus in Serie A
and played the full 90 minutes of the Coppa Italia final victory over Atalanta.
He benefited from his own performances and versatility, slotting in both at
right wing-back and central midfield, while he also took advantage of the
opportunity when midfield team-mates Paul Pogba and Nicolo Fagioli were
suspended for doping and betting offences respectively.
His contract at Juventus expires in 12 months and there has
been speculation about a potential move back to England, this time to a club
competing in the Champions League in Aston Villa. McKennie says he is in talks
with his agent, acknowledging Villa are one of the clubs mentioned, but says
the options will be laid out and resolved after Copa America.
He spoke to The Athletic this week as part of his
partnership with Puma, the brand he signed up to in early 2024 alongside two
USMNT team-mates, Christian Pulisic and Yunus Musah, who are also based in
Italy with AC Milan. McKennie came to sign with the brand after wearing the
Puma Future boot six months before agreeing a deal.
“I did my pre-season in them,” he explains. “I played well.
So I thought I may as well keep them. I have had knee problems in terms of
patellar tendinitis and I have plantar fasciitis (inflammation of the tissue
connected to your heel bone) on my foot. And it was a boot that was super
comfortable for my foot. I didn’t have to wear insoles in them and I was not
feeling pain when I play. They flew over to Italy, had a whole scanning
contraption device, put my foot in, looked at my arches, my size. Whenever I get
boots sent to me, it’s specifically for my foot, which is amazing.”
Superstition plays a part, too, with McKennie saying he will
not change the colour of his boot to an upgraded model if he’s in good form. He
will be hoping this continues during Copa America.