As the USMNT called and Arsenal awaited, Matt Turner met profound heartbreak

In a world where everyone is a statistical anomaly, where even the most average players have to outlast thousands upon thousands of competitors to carve out a career as a professional, Matt Turner is an outlier.

The U.S. men’s national team and soon-to-be Arsenal goalkeeper didn’t begin playing soccer until he was 14, going out for his high school squad simply so he could stay in shape for his main athletic pursuits of basketball and baseball. He only hopped in goal because the team’s one other ‘keeper got hurt on the first day of freshman tryouts. He was barely recruited to play in college, where his most notable moment was a colossal, viral mistake. He wasn’t drafted out of Fairfield University in 2016, but he made the New England Revolution roster after impressing as a preseason trialist, walking away from a more lucrative job he’d lined up in the business world to sign with the club. When he finally got a chance to play in MLS after three years spent mostly as a No. 3, he thrived, turning heads in 2018 and starring in 2019 and 2020 before being named the league’s goalkeeper of the year in 2021.

His excellent performances in New England led to his first U.S. cap in January 2021. Five months later, he helped the Americans to the Gold Cup title, raising his profile with some top-tier play that culminated with him winning the Golden Glove award given to the best goalkeeper in the tournament. Turner entered World Cup qualification locked into the USMNT backup job behind presumed starter Zack Steffen, but simply being in the squad was a real achievement.

Then, two days before the U.S. played its first qualifier at El Salvador, that story took a heartbreaking turn.

Early in the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 31, Turner, who was in Nashville with the USMNT, got a call from his then-fiancee Ashley Herron. She had made the short trip from Boston to see Turner and the Revs play at New York City FC the previous weekend, but arrived back in Massachusetts on Monday feeling a little bit off. A trip to the doctor on Tuesday brought some awful news: She had suffered a miscarriage. Herron was about 10 weeks into her pregnancy.

“I thought to myself that I needed to go home to be with her,” Turner told The Athletic. “I couldn’t imagine the fact that she was going through this alone. She was in the doctor’s office alone, she had the miscarriage alone and I wanted to be there for her. I just love her so much, and I wanted to help her, to just help ease the pain any way I could.”

First thing on Wednesday morning, hours before the U.S. was scheduled to fly from Tennessee to El Salvador for the match the following night, Turner made his way downstairs at the team hotel to tell Berhalter he needed to leave camp. He ended up bumping into him immediately after he stepped off the elevator. Before Turner could get a word out, the head coach hit him with some news of his own.

“He looks at me and says, ‘Hey Matty, Zack has back spasms, he can’t go. You’re playing tomorrow,’” Turner said.

Turner barely remembers how he responded to Berhalter — some platitude about being ready. Internally, he was a mess, standing in the elevator bank “like a deer in headlights, trying to choke back tears.”

“I just pretty much sank away,” he said. “Imagine Homer Simpson sinking back into the bushes. I just sink back into the elevator to go right back upstairs to call Ashley. I tell her what happened and she just, thank God for her, really, because she just said, ‘You have to stay. I’ll never let you miss that.’”

Turner is making this story public in part because he and Herron, who got married a few weeks ago, want to do what they can to make people understand that miscarriages are not uncommon. According to March of Dimes, about 10 to 15 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. For someone like Turner, a 27-year-old who had never before been expecting a child with a partner, that fact can come as a bit of a surprise.

“I never realized how many people had actually gone through it in their lives,” he said. “Even just talking around the team, some of the staff with the national team, there were loads of guys that could talk to each other about that experience. We just want to normalize it a little bit. Just hopefully make people feel like they’re not alone when they go through it.”

Turner didn’t tell anyone outside of his family about the miscarriage during that initial window, however. And after his conversation with Herron that Wednesday morning, he chose to go with the USMNT to Central America instead of returning to Boston. He started in El Salvador the following night, keeping a shutout in a scoreless draw in front of a heaving crowd at Estadio Cuscatlan, and remained in net for the U.S.’s 1-1 draw against Canada in Nashville and 4-1 road win at Honduras.

Turner spent most of that week holding his emotions off to the side as he and the team worked through a dramatic, controversial and draining first foray into qualifying. The strategy worked in terms of his on-field performance, with Turner playing well in all three matches, but it didn’t exactly allow him the space to process his feelings about the miscarriage.

In the hours after the victory in Honduras, a rollercoaster of a match that became a turning point in the USMNT’s entire qualification campaign, he headed up to his room, had a drink, put on a disco-heavy playlist that he listens to to unwind (“That playlist is riddled with Donna Summer. It’s music that my Mom and I always bonded over.”) and gave himself some time to actually feel.

“I was alone in the hotel, knocking back a beer, and I finally felt like I could breathe again,” he said. “With the pressure of the games, with the buildup, the fact that we were losing at halftime and came back and won, it was just all so much emotion, so much going on that I needed some time to myself to process everything. For me, that was the hardest part of it all. You have to compartmentalize, but then when do you have time to reflect? You have to make time to deal with the things that you need to deal with, because you can’t just forget and hope it fades into the past. You gotta be a human at some point.

“So I had my music, I had my beer and I just… exhaled. Just sat there and thought about how I’m going home and facing something much scarier than those crazy crowds in Honduras or El Salvador. I’m going to have to go home and help put our lives back together.”

He and Herron were able to do just that — not that his schedule got any more forgiving. Turner immediately returned to action with the Revs then was back with the U.S. a few weeks later, starting the home win against Jamaica on Oct. 7 and loss at Panama on Oct. 10. He played just fine in those two matches, but Berhalter replaced him with Steffen in the starting lineup in the third match of the window at home against Costa Rica in Columbus, Ohio on Oct. 13.

Turner was, naturally, disappointed by the decision, but the trip to Ohio wasn’t all bad. Not only did the U.S. beat Costa Rica to move into a solid position in the CONCACAF Octagonal, but Herron was able to travel to the game. A few weeks later, the couple found out they had conceived in Columbus. She’s due to give birth to a baby boy on July 16.

(Mackenzie Lynn Miles / USA TODAY Sports)

Becoming a father isn’t the only major life change Turner is preparing for, of course. In January, New England agreed to transfer him to Arsenal for a fee that sources said is just shy of $7 million. He’ll play his last game for the Revs on June 19 and join Arsenal in time for the start of their preseason on June 24.

For Turner, the move is a legitimate dream come true. He didn’t really get into watching soccer until the 2010 World Cup, when he was 16. After the tournament, he, like so many others on this side of the Atlantic, began to follow the Premier League, and became a fan of Arsenal. As he got a little bit older, during his final years in college and first season or two with the Revs, Turner spent many of his weekend mornings watching games at Arsenal supporters’ preferred bars.

“A lot of those Gooners probably saw me at the bar and obviously had no idea who I was, which is pretty funny to think about now,” he said.

Even after he began starring in MLS, it looked relatively unlikely that Turner would ever get the opportunity to move to Europe, nevermind to one of the biggest clubs in the Premier League. His value to the Revolution meant the club was always going to have a high asking price for him. The list of clubs that would be able to meet New England’s desired number for a soon-to-be 28-year-old goalkeeper who has never played outside of North America was always going to be pretty short, something Turner was very much attuned to. Before Arsenal came calling, he said no European club had ever made an offer for him.

“Towards the end of last year, probably in November, my agent mentioned something about Arsenal getting in contact and having a bit of interest,” he said. “He was like, ‘There’s this, this and this out there, a couple of teams in the Championship, nothing that’s going to hit the price that the Revs are going to want for you, but there’s a ridiculously long shot that Arsenal is interested. You’re on a list of probably five to eight goalkeepers that they could see themselves going for.’ That was his quote: ‘A ridiculously long shot.’”

Over the next couple of months, the ridiculous long shot turned into Arsenal’s primary target to provide cover behind Aaron Ramsdale. The England international was signed last summer for a transfer fee that could rise as high as $38 million and soon won the starting job from Bernd Leno, who is reportedly set to leave the club this summer. Before Arsenal opened talks with New England, however, Turner went back to the Revs to negotiate a new contract. He had outperformed the deal that paid him $375,000 in guaranteed compensation in 2021, and, not knowing if a European move would materialize, he was hoping he might be able to cash in on his big year. The club rebuffed him, a position Turner said he understood considering the fact they had given him new contracts in August 2019 and January 2021.

“And literally two days later, Arsenal comes in and throws in their first bid,” he said. “Now the wheels start turning. At that point, I already made my mind up that I wanted to go. It just felt right. … I thought it was going to be simple: They offer, great, Revs accept, done. But it was one of the biggest emotional rides I’ve ever been on, and that’s saying something considering what happened in the fall. It was off, it was on, it was off, it was on. I’m sending text messages, calling people, stuff that I probably didn’t have to do, but at the end of the day, everyone got where they needed to get and the deal got done.”

The parties agreed to the deal on Jan. 27, just hours before Turner would return to the USMNT starting lineup in place of the injured Steffen for a 1-0 win against El Salvador in Columbus. After the match, a young fan handed Turner a jersey to sign as he walked off the field. It wasn’t a New England or U.S. shirt, but a red Arsenal top.

MATT TURNER SIGNING AN ARSENAL JERSEY AFTER THE USMNT WIN 🤣 pic.twitter.com/qkwBw5vqUF

— USMNT Only (@usmntonly) January 28, 2022

The storybook scene can’t mask the many legitimate questions about how the move will play out. Turner said that he has every intention of competing for the starting job in preseason, but acknowledged that the general expectation is that Ramsdale will be the No. 1. His job, he said, will most likely be to “come in and push him and help him get better.”

Serving as Ramsdale’s backup would be a significant change from starting every single match for the Revs, for whom he recently returned to the field after injuries — which did not include frostbite, he said — sidelined him from mid-February until late-April. But irrespective of the potential for decreased playing time, Turner thinks the move will actually help his odds of starting at the World Cup for the USMNT, which will play friendlies against Morocco on Wednesday and Uruguay on Sunday and CONCACAF Nations League matches against Grenada on June 10 and at El Salvador on June 14.

Turner correctly noted that starting for the Revs while Steffen was backing up Ederson for Manchester City didn’t guarantee him anything with the USMNT. He entered qualifying as the backup and, apart from the first two games of the October window, served as the No. 2 in every match for which he and Steffen, who withdrew from this camp late last week due to family reasons, were both available.

“I needed to shake it up heading into Qatar. I really needed to, in my opinion,” Turner said. “Is it risky? Yeah, probably a little bit. But at the end of the day, it’s a step forward for my career. I’ve always said that I want to see how far I can take soccer, I want to really push it. This is the logical next step if that’s my mentality.”

Over the course of qualifying, Berhalter consistently cited Steffen’s ability to play with his feet as a reason for starting him over Turner despite the disparity in club appearances between the two. Steffen had a very high-profile, very costly recent error with the ball at his feet, but he has improved that part of his game since he moved to Man City from Columbus, where he played under Berhalter, in the summer of 2019. Turner likely needs to up that part of his game to have a shot at winning the USMNT job outright.

“I have to train at a higher level,” he said. “The style of play with the Revolution is mighty old school. If there’s pressure, we don’t really try to play out of it too much. At Arsenal, the goalkeepers are required to play a little bit more with the ball, playing in the system rather than just sort of going out there. They have to follow tactics and game plans a little more closely. Those are things that I know are valued with the national team that I’ll be challenged more with Arsenal.

“In December and January, I got to spend weeks at a time with the national team in buildup to games. And in all those games, I feel like I was pretty solid with the ball at my feet. Apart from the one blip in Canada, pretty solid connecting passes, making the right decisions. And then I don’t train exactly like that when I’m with the Revs, so I lose it. I get it for a couple of weeks, then I lose it. Now I’ll be training that way all the time.”

Berhalter has been a big booster of the move, telling Turner in January that he thought it was a good step for his career and that it would challenge him in the ways he needed to be challenged. He’s already generally considered a superior shot stopper to Steffen, a stance that was borne out by the numbers in qualifying. If he can maintain that element of his game and improve with his feet, he’ll have a real argument to start in Qatar in November.

“I wouldn’t say I’m not concerned (about potentially not playing regularly), but I’m also not entirely concerned,” he said. “I’m just going to take it as it comes, you know? I’m gonna work my hardest and then put my best foot forward every time I’m out on the field with Arsenal, every time I’m out on the field with the national team. Regardless, I’m proud of the decision I made. I’m proud of where I’m headed. And I’m gonna have a lot of confidence going into November, that’s for sure.”

There’s not much time between now and then, but Turner and his family have plenty on the docket. Herron flew to London with her mother on Monday to get settled in their new home ahead of the birth. Turner, who arrived in Cincinnati for U.S. camp on Sunday, will join them there on June 20. Their son, who they’re planning on naming Easton, should follow not long after. Then comes the start of the EPL season with Arsenal and the USMNT’s final preparations for the World Cup.

“You can imagine this stuff, but only in a fantasy,” he said. “You know that it’s never actually going to happen. Thinking about all the little things along the way that had to break for this to be possible, all the signs and all the omens, it’s all crazy. It’s really crazy. I never thought that this would actually happen for me. I’m just so excited and blessed.”

(John Dorton / ISI Photos / Getty Images)