At his team’s training session on Wednesday, Columbus Crew head coach Gregg Berhalter could neither confirm nor deny reports out of Argentina linking the club to Argentine forward Silvio Romero.
“I would say that I’m not going to comment on a player who’s not on our roster,” Berhalter said, repeating the line he’s taken to using about all non-Crew player links.
The league on Thursday confirmed reports that the Chicago Fire would hold the right of first refusal on Romero should he ever move to MLS. The forward currently plays for Lanus in Argentina, a team coached by Crew legend Guillermo Barros Schelotto. Despite the obvious connection, Berhalter said that since his hiring just over a year ago, he hasn’t contacted the former MLS MVP.
“I haven’t; I would like to,” Berhalter said. “It’s obviously dialogue that I would want to open up, and he obviously could be a valuable resource, given his position.”
Since taking over the helm of the Crew, Berhalter has added players from leagues in the USA, Austria, Germany and Norway in his first year as head coach, but has yet to acquire any South American talent.
Throughout the club's history, the Crew have generally experienced success with South Americans, and Berhalter said his scouting network is working to focus on the region.
“I think that’s just how it’s fallen so far,” Berhalter said. “We’ve brought in a couple of Central Americans, and we’ve been scouting intensively in South America. It’s just looking for the right guy.”
Berhalter has not confirmed how many scouts the Crew employs or where those scouts are stationed, but he said the club is continuing to expand the network.
“We’re building that; we’re building relationships all over,” he said. “I don’t want to get too in-depth into laying out a blueprint, but we’re looking at markets that could be valuable and we’re exploring that.”
- Get more Columbus news at TheCrew.com
But building the infrastructure the team needs isn’t easy, he said, noting that the club is striving to employ “our own guys,” rather than freelance scouts.
“It’s an interesting project,” Berhalter said. “We’re looking at a number of ways to get it done and talking to a number of people in terms of the exact way we want to execute it. But we feel that in this amount of time, we’ve made a lot of progress.”
But the Crew's head coach and sporting director will continue to be tight-lipped about the team’s priorities moving forward.
“If I told you, for example, that we’re scouting in Country X, how many teams are in that country?” he said. “Then it’s easy to gather every player in that country and know who they are. Just by nature of the business we’re in, we wouldn’t want to give that information out.”
Andrew King covers the Columbus Crew for MLSsoccer.com.
