Mauricio Pochettino faces trickiest career challenge as USMNT coach

When the U.S. men’s national team players are introduced to Mauricio Pochettino, they meet a coach the U.S. has never had before.

Pochettino, officially appointed on Tuesdayboasts an impressive coaching resume with some of the biggest clubs and players in European soccer, and has no history in the American soccer system. His profile is immense, but his working style will be unfamiliar. The desire to find out what the new boss is like will likely color the players’ first interactions, right down to the very first handshake.

Pochettino will also want to learn at the same time.

“When you touch some people, you feel the energy,” he said the High Performance Podcast in 2020in which he describes how he gets a first impression 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 have a lot of information that’s so important [in order] to manage [them] … Negative, positive, you can feel everything. I think we all have the capacity to feel… that’s the moment to create a link.”

As a new coach, Pochettino walks into a room with a kaleidoscope of emotions, some of the most recent coming after a tragic event at this summer’s Copa América that cost Gregg Berhalter his job. In a single handshake, Pochettino can sense the emotions that come with the pressure to live up to lofty expectations (Christian Pulisic), or the struggle to recover from injuries (Tyler Adams), or the desire to move on after a tumultuous few professional years (Gio Reyna). Every player has their own story, motivations and feelings. Pochettino will have to process those long before he pens his first starting XI and begins to map out how this team will actually play.

“Philosophy, methodology, style of football, these different ideas are not important,” Pochettino said in that podcast. “The players have to trust you. Day after day – this is the only way [to build that trust].”

Pochettino now hopes to prove him wrong in 2020; his success as US coach has been built on building trust without that daily contact, and in a completely unknown context.

For all his great work at club level, Pochettino has never been an international manager before, and thus has never led a group without the day-to-day interactions he so clearly values. He has managed only one player who is currently on the U.S. squad’s radar (center back Cameron Carter-Vickers during his early days at Tottenham). The wider talent pool remains high on potential, but Pochettino will have limited ability to help players fulfill it.

He must navigate all of this with an eye toward a daunting end goal: oversee a stellar performance by the Americans at the 2026 World Cup (whatever that means), and in the process transform the sport in the country as a whole (whatever that means). He’ll be asked to do so as the first Latino and first native Spanish speaker of any kind to hold the position — a notable feat considering how much of the country’s soccer culture has been built by those groups.

By comparison, navigating the personal motivations of American players seems trivial. Pochettino has managed players from all over the world at clubs that need to push their potential (Espanyol and Southampton), one with somewhat more financial muscle (Tottenham) and two financial powerhouses brimming with world-class talent (Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea). The expectations at these clubs can vary wildly, but in each case Pochettino has been able to methodically achieve varying degrees of success, honing the play of young players and getting the collective group to adopt his tactics over time.

Tactics, at least, is one area where Pochettino won’t have to break a whole lot of brand-new ground for the U.S. Like his predecessor Gregg Berhalter, Pochettino almost always plays with a back four, encourages his teams to play out of defense and values ​​possession as a way to unbalance the opposition. Both managers encourage their defenders to get high up the pitch and join the attack, and Pochettino will have some interesting ingredients to do that in left back Antonee Robinson and, if healthy, right back Sergiño Dest (though without much depth behind either). The nuances of how these things are executed will vary from manager to manager, but the wheel is unlikely to be reinvented.

The biggest difference between the managers, aside from their experience, is their closeness to the players. Berhalter brought up the current generation of US players at a young age and acted as a kind of father figure to their development. Pochettino, on the other hand, has no such problems. His teams need to be connected. His players need to play with intensity, both on and off the ball. If they don’t, they don’t play – no matter what he thinks of their handshakes.

Adams said in a recent interview that the US needed a “ruthless” manager. In Pochettino, they have one who could have more scope than his predecessors to be just that.

But first he has to build trust.