"I almost wanted to quit soccer" — that's Sebastian Berhalter, reflecting on a 2021 season at Austin FC where he managed one assist in 18 games and genuinely wondered if he belonged in professional football. Three years later, he played every minute of every game at a home World Cup and signed for Middlesbrough. The arc doesn't make sense until you look closely at how it happened.
Berhalter is 25 now. Son of former USMNT boss Gregg Berhalter, he's carried that name his entire career — which made his early struggles cut that much deeper. A Columbus Crew academy product who went to UNC, signed a homegrown deal, won an MLS Cup as a rookie, and then... nothing. Austin FC took him on loan and he barely registered. He looked around the locker room and, by his own admission, thought he might be the worst player in it.
Vancouver rebuilt him
The Whitecaps paid $50,000 in General Allocation Money to get him out of Austin. There was no obvious reason to believe it would work. What followed was two seasons of gradual development under Vanni Sartini, who shifted Berhalter away from wide roles and settled him into defensive midfield — where his intensity, set-piece delivery, and long-range shooting finally had a proper home.
By 2024, he was a consistent starter. By 2025, he was the best player on a team that reached the MLS Cup final and a Concacaf Champions Cup final. A lot of that had to do with Ryan Gauld's knee injury forcing Berhalter into a leadership role he hadn't held before. He didn't shrink from it. Four goals, 12 assists, 2,296 minutes — career highs across the board.
Then Thomas Müller arrived in Vancouver. The 2014 World Cup winner, freshly retired from European football, apparently took a particular interest in Berhalter — golf rounds, NHL games, film sessions. "He'll go to 19-year-olds or 32-year-olds and say, 'Hey, let's work on this,'" Berhalter said. "It's surreal." Whether Müller's presence directly elevated Berhalter or simply validated what was already there is hard to say. What's clear is that Berhalter left Vancouver as a different player than the one who arrived.
The World Cup, Middlesbrough, and what comes next
His first USMNT cap came in July 2025, a friendly against Switzerland. By November he was scoring in a 5-1 win over Uruguay. By the following summer, he was in Pochettino's World Cup squad, scoring in the group stage against Türkiye and playing in every game of the tournament. Middlesbrough saw enough to pay $2 million — not a number that makes headlines in European football, but meaningful for a player with an expiring MLS deal and exactly zero games of European experience.
He's hit the ground running in the Championship: two goals, two assists in his first 10 games, lining up alongside former Columbus Crew teammates Aidan Morris and Max Arfsten. The transition hasn't looked like a transition at all.
With Tim Ream retired and the USMNT captaincy up for grabs, Berhalter is now part of that conversation. Pochettino called having him "priceless" after a September win over Chile where Berhalter scored and assisted. His set-piece delivery alone makes him hard to leave out — and in a team built around young attacking talent, a defensively-sound, composed presence in the middle has real value that doesn't always show up cleanly on a scoresheet.
The USMNT's defensive midfield odds just became a lot easier to price with him in the mix. Whether he gets the armband or not, he's already one of the first names on Pochettino's team sheet — which, given where he was in 2021, is the part that genuinely doesn't compute.
