Manchester City’s thirty three year old Claudio Reyna will return to his home state of New Jersey to play for the New York Red Bulls and his former college and national team coach Bruce Arena.
This rumor was hot last summer in MLS and Reyna’s father had even made it clear to some in New Jersey that this was going to happen. Reyna will earn at least over $300,000 per year as a designated player after an outstanding career in Europe with Bayer Leverkusen, Wolfsburg, Rangers, and Sunderland. European clubs put a huge value on Reyna’s soccer brain and ability to calm a game down in extremely athletic leagues and most recently Manchester City.
Reyna failed to impress or lead in the 2006 World Cup for the United States after an outstanding career that included 112 caps.
Now Reyna will definetly be more coachable than Amado Guevara who was sent packing to Chivas USA but one has to wonder how the injury prone player will hold up on the artificial surface at Giants Stadium. Lets not forget that Toronto and NE will also be playing on the fact stuff so Reyna will be playing easily over half of his games on the fake stuff. Reyna will be brought in to help the Red Bull possession game plus provide leadership…… Is he that big of an improvement over Guevara by MLS standards ? Or did Arena just want to get rid of player that he didn’t feel he could manage or want to put the effort into managing. I for one would not want the headache of Guevara despite his obvious talent.
Lets hope for Red Bull fans sake that Reyna stays healthy. As a DP he needs to be the Red Bulls best player and as fans and media should hold David Beckham to producing in MLS they also should hold Reyna to just as high a standard.