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When the U.S. men’s national team players meet Mauricio Pochettino, they will meet a coach unlike any the United States has had in the history of the program.
Pochettino, who was officially appointed on Tuesday, boasts an impressive coaching resume that has worked at some of the biggest clubs and players in European football, and has no experience in the American football system. His profile is huge, but his working style will be unknown. The desire to find out what the new boss is like will likely colour the players’ first interactions, right down to the very first handshake.
Pochettino, too, will be looking to learn at this precise moment.
“When you touch certain people, you feel the energy,” he told the High Performance podcast in 2020, describing how he gets an initial sense of his players’ mental state simply by shaking their hands. “You feel if it’s good, if they need love, if they’re upset, if they’re sleeping well … you can get a lot of information that’s so important.” [in order] manage [them] … Negative, positive, you can feel everything. I think we all have the capacity to feel… it’s time to create a connection.
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As a new coach, Pochettino enters a room with a kaleidoscope of feelings, one from a defeat in this summer’s Copa America that cost Gregg Berhalter his job. In a handshake, Pochettino can sense the emotions that come with the pressure to live up to high expectations (Christian Pulisic), or the struggle to recover from injuries (Tyler Adams), or the desire to turn the page after a tumultuous professional career (Gio Reyna). Each player has his own story, his own motivations and his own feelings. Pochettino will have to deal with them long before he writes down his initial starting XI and begins to map out how this team will actually play.
“The philosophy, the methodology, the style of football, these different ideas are not important,” Pochettino said on the podcast. “The players have to trust you. Day in and day out, that’s the only way to do it. [to build that trust].”
Pochettino will now be hoping to prove him wrong in 2020; his success as America’s manager is based on building trust without this daily contact, and in a totally unknown context.
For all his excellent work at club level, Pochettino has never coached internationally before, and has therefore never managed a group without the day-to-day interactions he so relishes. He has previously managed only one player currently on the U.S. team’s radar (center-back Cameron Carter-Vickers in his Tottenham debut). The wider talent pool remains rich with potential, but Pochettino will have limited ability to help players exploit it.
He will have to do all of this with one big end goal in mind: to make sure the Americans perform well at the 2026 World Cup (whatever that means) and, in the process, transform the sport in his country (whatever that means). He will be asked to do it as the first Latino and first native Spanish speaker to hold the job — a remarkable feat considering how much of the country’s soccer culture has been built by these groups.
Compared to that, it seems hard to understand the personal motivations of American players. Pochettino has managed players from all over the world at clubs that need to make the most of what they have (Espanyol and Southampton), a club with slightly more financial clout (Tottenham), and two financial powerhouses brimming with world-class talent (Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea). The expectations of these clubs may be very different, but in each case Pochettino has managed to achieve varying degrees of success in a methodical manner, elevating the level of play of young players and ensuring that the collective group adopts his tactics over time.
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Tactics is one area where Pochettino won’t need to do much new for the United States. Like his predecessor Gregg Berhalter, Pochettino almost always plays with a back four, encourages his teams to play outside the defense and values possession as a way to unbalance the opposition. Both managers encourage their fullbacks to get high up the field and join the attack, and Pochettino will have some interesting ingredients to do that in left-back Antonee Robinson and, when healthy, right-back Sergiño Dest (albeit without much depth behind either). The nuances of how these things are executed will differ between managers, but it’s unlikely that the wheel will be reinvented.
The biggest difference between the coaches, besides their level of experience, is their proximity to the players. Berhalter raised the current generation of the United States at a young age and played a fatherly role in their development. Pochettino, on the other hand, has no such hang-up. His teams have to be connected. His players have to play with intensity with and without the ball. If they don’t, they won’t play, no matter what he thinks of their handshake.
In a recent interview, Adams said the United States needed a “ruthless” manager. In Pochettino, they have someone who may have more scope than any of his predecessors to be just that.
But first he must build trust.
