John Brooks is headed back to a familiar place for the next chapter of his club career.
Brooks rejoined his former club Hertha Berlin as a free agent signing. the club announced Brooks signed a two-year deal, which will run through the 2025-26 German season.
“I am happy to be able to play for Hertha again and follow the Berlin path,” Brooks said in a club interview. “Here I have become a professional and a national player and I have many good memories of the club. Now I want to give something back and help achieve our goals.”
The 31-year-old left Hoffenheim earlier this summer after not signing a new contract with the Bundesliga side. Brooks originally joined Hertha Berlin’s youth academy in 2011 and proceeded to make 130 senior appearances for the club until joining Wolfsburg in 2017.
Brooks made 146 appearances for Wolfsburg from 2017-22 before then moving to Hoffenheim. He also spent a short time at Portuguese club Benfica, but only featured in five matches there.
Brooks has earned 45 caps for the U.S. men’s national team, last featuring for his country in September 2021 during World Cup Qualifying.
Hertha Berlin are 11th in the 2. Bundesliga standings through the opening stages of the new campaign.
Since he step down to Bundesliga 2 his US men nat team career is over! 🙁
We have too much depth in central defense (smh)
What? When was he in B.2?
to be fair, I think his Nats career was over before any of this happened whether anyone thought it was justified or not
his pro career has been wobbling since he left wolfsburg, which was an own-goal since they were a mid-table B.1 team starting him every week.
re his international career, people forget he was an injury sub who played 45′ minutes (though key ones) in the 2014 tournament — like GB before him — who proved out of his depth when handed the reins himself in 2015-16, as shown by our results in gold cup 15, copa 16, and the first two qualifying games, particularly costa rica.
the interesting question is if arena was going to get stuck on cameron besler omar, was he better than that. i know my beef with arena at the time was that we had other better options, such as opara, hedges, and at the end zimmerman and miazga coming up. but the 3 he was stuck on, brooks might have been better than omar. if anyone but omar starts that TnT game maybe we at least tie. it was a down ebb but i thought the sheer amount of germans he benched was overdone. eg starting villafana wide was just as weird.
but anyhow, he is the perennial “club form” guy where everyone forgets how his actual NT starting stint went. to me he is slow as molasses, likes to mark air and not a player, and while having some home run assist ability is sloppier under pressure than his fanboys acknowledge. not unlike ream.
@The Imperative Voice,
You have to remember that JAB probably had one of, if not the worst game a CB has ever had down in Costa Rica during qualifying on Klinsmann’s watch, and shorty after JK was fired and Arena was brought in to save qualifying(which he obviously didn’t do). So for me, I’m thinking Arena saw that performance and said to himself there is no way I’m playing Brooks the rest of the way……I could be wrong of course, but it’s not illogical either lol