Every coaching hire in sports represents a degree of risk. This is especially true in soccer, where modern managers are expected to style themselves as ideologues, imposing a distinct tactical aesthetic. As such, the variance from one coach to another tends to be bigger than in most other sports, and so the implications of switching managers are also larger.
But U.S. Soccer isn’t just taking a gamble by appointing the Argentine Mauricio Pochettino to succeed Gregg Berhalter as manager of the men’s national team, less than two years before a World Cup played on home soil. The federation has in fact pushed all its chips to the center of the table, paying Pochettino—who most recently coached European juggernauts Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, and Tottenham Hotspur—$6 million per year, per ESPN, a multiple more than any of his predecessors. He will be the highest-paid coach in the history of the national team.
Pochettino is surely the most pedigreed manager the USMNT has ever hired. Jürgen Klinsmann was a brilliant player and, as a coach, led Germany to the 2006 World Cup semifinals, but it’s probably fair to say he was never renowned as an elite tactician. He brought excitement to the U.S. program upon his hiring in 2011, but he never really delivered on the hype. The eccentric Serb Bora Milutinovic, tasked with guiding the U.S. at the 1994 World Cup—also played stateside—was well known, but as a peripatetic specialist in managing underdog national teams. Pochettino is something else entirely, an undisputed member of the global coaching elite.
Even trying for Pochettino was seen as an audacious reach for U.S. Soccer, and landing him is the coaching equivalent of when the New York Cosmos coaxed Pelé out of retirement in 1975 or the L.A. Galaxy bagged a still-in-his-prime David Beckham in 2007.
Pochettino identifies as a so-called Bielsista, a disciple of fellow Argentine Marcelo Bielsa—the influential and intense coach who also inspired Pep Guardiola, the foremost manager of his generation. Before Bielsa hit the big time himself, he discovered a 13-year-old Pochettino, the son of a farmworker in rural Argentina. As the story goes, Bielsa knocked on the Pochettinos’ door at 2 a.m. and demanded to see the sleeping boy’s legs, curious whether his limbs had the strength and shape of a footballer’s. When young Mauricio woke up, he learned he had been signed to play under Bielsa for Newell’s Old Boys, a club some 90 miles from home. As a professional, Pochettino spent much of his long career as a hard-nosed central defender at Espanyol, where he would briefly reunite with Bielsa, who also brought him to the 2002 World Cup when Bielsa was in charge of the Argentina national team.
(Ironically, it was Bielsa’s Uruguay—yes, he has changed jobs quite a bit—that knocked the U.S. out of the Copa América in July, thus dooming Berhalter and creating a vacancy for Pochettino. Bielsa has also been linked with the U.S. job himself in the past, but he doesn’t speak English—an automatic deal-breaker for the federation.)
Bielsa’s hallmark is a system of suffocating pressing and attacking. Pochettino blended this philosophy with strong motivational skills and a flourish of the occult. He has spoken of energía universal (universal energy) and believes that if you channel a “superior energy,” you can connect with something that “makes you feel invincible.” This is reportedly why Pochettino kept a bowl of lemons in his office, to absorb negative energy.
In his first managerial job, Pochettino took over an Espanyol team on the verge of relegation in 2009 and put it on solid footing. Next, at Southampton, he recorded the team’s highest-ever points tally at the time in the Premier League. Then, he turned Tottenham Hotspur from serial underperformers into Premier League title contenders while also reaching the 2019 Champions League final. Five months after that game, and after five years at the club, he was fired due to a decline in the team’s performance. A little over a year later, Pochettino joined Paris Saint-Germain, where he managed Lionel Messi, Neymar, and Kylian Mbappé to a French league title. Ultimately, that wasn’t enough for an ambitious club seeking to win its first Champions League trophy, and after 18 months, Pochettino’s name was added to the long list of dismissed PSG managers.
In 2023, Chelsea tempted the manager back to the Premier League; the club was desperate for someone to build a cohesive squad out of an enormous, young, and comically expensive roster. After a turbulent start to the campaign, in which Chelsea sat in 10th place at the midpoint of the season, Pochettino managed to coax some actual consistency out of the team. The club won its final five games of the season and earned a respectable sixth-place finish, all things considered. And then, just as it seemed Pochettino had finally gotten the team to jell, he left after only one season. The coach and club had clashed over recruitment strategy, squad management, and training methods; his departure was described as being by “mutual consent.”
If that rundown of Pochettino’s career exemplifies anything, it’s that, for all his achievements, he does not come without question marks. Despite the big teams he has coached, his trophy cabinet is bare—he has that lone Ligue 1 title and a pair of lesser trophies with PSG, whose financial dominance over the French league all but guarantees silverware. And he has yet to coach in the international game, where the stop-start cadence of competition puts such a premium on the time spent with players.
Pochettino drills his teams to press their opponents high up the field, win the ball quickly, and bomb forward in attack. He likes to work with young, energetic players, molding them in his methods. And while his muscular brand of soccer should suit the athletic American player pool, he will be severely hampered by time constraints. The kind of intensity and positional play Pochettino will no doubt look to replicate with the U.S. takes endless hours on the practice pitch to refine. It works only when 11 players move as a tightly organized unit rather than as a cluster of careering projectiles. Yet the new head coach will likely have no more than 10 international windows—if that—to work with his players, and much time in those camps will be lost to jet lag, recovery, and match preparation. Only next summer’s 2025 CONCACAF Gold Cup will give him an extended period to work. After that, it’s on to the 2026 World Cup, where he’ll be expected to field a squad capable of reaching the latter rounds of the first 48-team tournament, delivering some kind of crowning achievement to mark the USMNT’s plodding upward march. (The U.S. hasn’t featured in the semifinals since the inaugural, 13-team World Cup in 1930.)
In international soccer, you can’t simply buy new players if the ones available to you won’t do. Pochettino will be working with the same talent Berhalter did and will have to patch the same gaps. For all the upside in this still-youngish American team, and for all the players active in Europe’s major leagues, few are difference makers for their clubs. Christian Pulisic is, at present, the only standout player on an elite European team. Tyler Adams has lost the past season and a half to injuries. Weston McKennie has been cast onto the scrap heap once more at Juventus after he fought his way back into the lineup yet again last season. Gio Reyna, for all his gifts, has yet to reclaim the consistent minutes that have eluded him at Borussia Dortmund since his breakout 2020-21 season. Goalkeeper Matt Turner likely won’t be the first choice at Nottingham Forest. We could go on like this for a while.
But then, Pochettino will also be building on what his predecessor put in place. Though their résumés aren’t quite in the same league, the two coaches aren’t all that different in their managerial styles. Like Berhalter, Pochettino is considered a players’ coach who values culture, communication, and team bonding; on that score, much work has already been done in the half decade under Berhalter. Even if you’re under the impression that Berhalter didn’t do much right—and he did a great many things well, as it happens—it’s hard to deny that he built a tight, young team when he had inherited an old and rancorous one. In that sense, Pochettino is hardly starting from scratch.
When U.S. Soccer technical director Matt Crocker rehired Berhalter last summer—when Crocker himself was just months into the job—he spoke of an extensive, analytics-based hiring process from which Berhalter emerged as the winner. That Berhalter was dismissed just a year later must have been painful for both of them.
If every coaching hire is a risk, it is also a reaction to the last coach. This time, Crocker seems to have simply chased after the biggest names in the game. After newly retired former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp turned U.S. Soccer down, Crocker didn’t have to look much further down the unspoken managerial power rankings to find his man.
This time around, U.S. Soccer went after the most famous coach it could sign. Now, it will hope for a payoff.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a regular contributor on soccer to The Ringer. The Long Game, his book on the United States men’s national team, will be published by Viking Books ahead of the 2026 World Cup. He teaches at Marist College.