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Pressure? It comes with the territory for Mauricio Pochettino, what with his territory these days being the United States and the job of managing the men’s national team. For a World Cup. That the US will largely host next year. And yet Pochettino felt the dial turn a little further on the Friday before last when he watched a clip of Donald Trump hosting Gianni Infantino at the White House.
“Can the US win?” Trump asked his presidential counterpart at Fifa. To which, for a man as obsequious as Infantino, there was only one reply. Pochettino smiles. “Gianni said yes, but I was disappointed with this answer,” he says. “He should say: ‘You need to ask your great coach, Pochettino.’ Because for sure, he can give a better opinion.”
The Argentinian has never liked people encroaching into his areas of expertise. It is a part of his machismo, his self-belief. How would he have dealt with the question? Perhaps with a greater degree of expectation management because Pochettino knows the US are some way short of the elite. There remains work to do to develop the sport in the country.
But Pochettino is nothing if not a romantic, someone to see the possibilities and after walking away from Chelsea at the end of last season, he found the stars aligning, seducing him. He remembered a line from Daniel Levy, his former chairman at Tottenham. “Daniel always told me that football was about timing,” Pochettino says, and this was perfect – a once in a lifetime opportunity opening up before him. He signed a one-campaign contract with US Soccer in August. A return to club management could wait.
The timing would be wrong for Pochettino with regard to the England job, which was vacated by Gareth Southgate after Euro 2024 and occupied at the time by Lee Carsley on an interim basis. Pochettino was linked to the position and not only because John McDermott, with whom he worked productively at Spurs, was overseeing the appointment as the Football Association’s technical director.
The way Pochettino tells it, he was “never involved” in the process that ended with the FA turning to Thomas Tuchel in mid-October. “The decision [of the FA] to start the search for a coach was after we signed with the US,” Pochettino says.
Would he have considered England? Pochettino’s instinctive reaction is to say yes because, well, that is just him. He normally wants to be in these kind of conversations. But as an Argentinian, he feels his nationality might have been a problem. “For sure, the history [between the nations] is there and that can be controversial … an Argentine guy defending the flag of England,” Pochettino says. “I love England. This is like my home now. But I was never put in that position so it’s not a situation we need to analyse.”
Pochettino has checked in with the US at a seismic moment for the game in the country, the most exciting and potentially transformative since it hosted the 1994 World Cup, which led to the formation of Major League Soccer in 1996.
The 53-year-old says the US was “always a mystery” to him and was drawn to experiencing a different culture, taking in new things such as an NFL game, which he did when he watched the Los Angeles Rams at the SoFi Stadium. Also, to get his head around counterintuitive stuff such as some of his players having not played football until they were 12. The need to adapt is one of Pochettino’s buzz phrases.
The bigger picture shows US Soccer primed to move all of its national teams into a purpose-built training centre in Atlanta in April 2026. According to Pochettino, that will be when people see “football is going to be a serious sport [in the US] because it has a home”.
He adds: “When you go to the US now [for camps and matches], one time you go to Los Angeles, then it’s New York, Chicago, Miami, Orlando or St Louis. Where is the centre for football? If you look at the training centres of the NFL and baseball, you say: ‘Wow.’ With football, it is: ‘Where is the team going to train? We need to ask the colleges and universities.’
“We have Lionel Messi in the MLS and he is helping a lot. But creating the new training centre in Atlanta is as important an impact as having a Messi. In five or 10 years, for sure the US can be No 1 in the world.”
Pochettino returns on several occasions to something that has been said for years – the potential for the game in the US is extraordinary. “For us, the pressure is going to be there [at the World Cup] because we are a host,” he says.
“And then it’s a country where the mentality is about winning. In sport, in everything that Americans are involved in, they want to win. The players know it’s going to be massive pressure and now our president [Trump] likes to put pressure on, but it’s welcome. That means we are going to feel the adrenaline we need to feel. We are ready to deliver.”
Pochettino’s American employers seem more relaxed than his previous set at Chelsea. When he was hired by Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali in the summer of 2023, the club were reeling from a 12th-placed Premier League finish and there were members of staff who feared they had further to fall.
Pochettino would guide Chelsea to sixth and strong runs in the domestic cups, the form consistently good after Christmas. He helped to improve the performance of plenty of players while dealing with numerous injuries; impositions from above, too. Whose idea was it to recruit a specialist set-piece coach from outside Pochettino’s tightly knit circle?
At various points during the season, he did not sound as if he was loving the job and from the outside looking in, it was possible to see it as a doomed professional relationship. To repeat: Pochettino demands control and authority in his areas.
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“If you analyse all the circumstances – from where the team came the season before us and [how we] faced so many challenges … and it’s not the time to talk too much but it was really positive in the way we were able to move the team forward,” Pochettino says. “We learned a lot. We can be proud of the way we finished.”
After eight seasons with Southampton, Spurs and Chelsea, Pochettino will always be connected to the Premier League. He has watched with interest as Pep Guardiola has struggled at Manchester City. There has been a bit of competitive tension between the pair in the past; Guardiola’s “Harry Kane team” comment about Pochettino’s Spurs went down very badly. But the respect has usually been there and never more so than now.
“I am 100% convinced that Guardiola today is a much, much better coach,” Pochettino says. “It is difficult for him to be better but now he is because he is suffering things that sometimes [only] we suffered in the beginning. When you start your career as a coach it is not easy sometimes to find the right project. If before he was one of the best of the best, he is much, much better. He is a real manager now.”
As for Spurs, where Pochettino managed for five and a half years, doing pretty much everything apart from winning a trophy, the love affair endures; the sense of unfinished business. “In the bottom of my heart, I still feel the same – I would like one day to come back,” he says. “Not because of my ego. It’s because my feeling is I would like one day to win with Tottenham.
“We were so close and it was so painful. The problem was that this type of journey creates a lot of friction for different reasons and I made mistakes. But the good thing is when you are clever, you learn from them.
“It’s like when a relationship finishes … I feel empty, I feel so disappointed. With everyone but also with myself because I didn’t manage well [enough]. Tottenham is now a club with an expectation to win. That is why I would like one day to come back. It’s six years since we left and it’s always going to be a special club for me.”
Pochettino is preoccupied with the adventure at hand; the journey, and that applies on a literal level, too. The travel is a big factor. “They still didn’t give me … come se dice? The green card,” he says, after being asked whether he enjoys celebrity status in the US. “The last time in Los Angeles we were waiting one hour and a half in the queue. I am not complaining but I cannot feel this status. I will feel it if one day they give me the green card.”
The vast majority of Pochettino’s squad play for European clubs, most of them in the top leagues, but mitigating the distances to them, together with the relatively small number of contact hours, is prominent among the challenges. He says he is leaning on new technologies in his working strategy.
Pochettino has won five of his six matches, losing to Mexico in Guadalajara, and has two in the Concacaf Nations League finals this week – against Panama on Thursday, then Mexico or Canada on Sunday, both at SoFi Stadium. As always, he is pushing to create the right connections, the right energy. The pressure will only continue to rise. Pochettino relishes the heat.
