John Harkes

John Harkes
For the long time soccer heads out there, this may be old news, but the reason that John Harkes was dropped from the 1998 World Cup team was because he was having an affair with Eric Wynalda’s wife.

Allegedly.

Harkes, a current ESPN soccer analyst, has long denied having an affair with Amy Wynalda.

Wynalda, a former ESPN soccer analyst, brought up the situation Monday night during a discussion on “Fox Football Fone-In” about a scandal in England over an alleged relationship between current English captain John Terry and the former partner of Wayne Bridge, his teammate on the national squad.

Sampson told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was glad the story was coming out now because “maybe people will have a little better of an understanding of what happened in the final months leading up to the World Cup.”

And it’s also interesting to note that Harkes trumped Wynalda again, replacing Wynalda as ESPN’s lead soccer analyst in 2006.

Of course, Wynalda may only be spilling the beans now, not because of the John Terry-Wayne Bridge situation, but because he’s writing a book. But he got Steve Sampson to talk about it, and it’s surprising to read that Wynalda was actually against Sampson’s decision to drop Harkes at the time.

Since this was soccer in the United States in the 1990s, not many cared about the situation at the time. Too bad TMZ didn’t exist back then… we wouldn’t have had to wait 12 years for all the details!