Mauricio Pochettino’s worst moment as USMNT manager became the stage for his best one

DANA POINT, Calif. — Fifteen months ago, Mauricio Pochettino walked out of SoFi Stadium at the low point of his tenure as the U.S. men’s soccer team’s manager.

Not only had his players lost both games at the Concacaf Nations League final four, but they had lost badly, with a squad including many of the program’s stars. He had taken the job to prepare one of the World Cup’s cohosts for the biggest stage, and everything felt about as far from ready as possible.

Two weeks ago, Pochettino was back on the same field, about an hour north of here, joined by many of the same players. This time, they charged to a 4-1 rout of Paraguay in the Americans’ World Cup opener, jolting the tournament and the nation to attention.

“I didn’t recognize it,” he said in a gathering with media at his office in the team’s swanky hotel along the Pacific Ocean. “Because it was empty” the first time.

Indeed, the stands were mostly empty when the U.S. played Panama in the semifinals, then Canada in the third-place game. They were filled only in the other halves of those doubleheaders, when Mexico won twice to take its first Nations League title after three straight U.S. triumphs.

“I was crying afterward in the dressing room, because I felt so sad for all the American people, for the players, for the staff,” Pochettino recalled. “I said, ‘OK, we play in our own place, our own country, and 70,000 Mexican people’ … I cannot accept that.”

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This time, as he put it, was “a completely different vibe, different energy.” The place was full, and backing the hosts. Sure, that it was a World Cup helped, even with the ticket prices. But it was clear from the moment the crowd joined in singing the national anthem that there really were U.S. national team fans in the stands.

There’s still a long way to go this summer, with progression to the knockout rounds and first place secured before Thursday’s group stage finale against Turkey (10 p.m., Fox29, Telemundo 62). And the U.S. team hopes there will be a long way still to go after that.

But given this game’s lessened stakes, there’s a moment to stop and survey just how far the program has come.

The most striking feature of Pochettino’s office is a balcony with a postcard view of the water, the surfers in it, and the stunning sunsets beyond them. Ranked No. 2 is a wall covered with a U.S. Soccer logo and one of the team’s slogans for the tournament: Why Not U.S.?

Within the lines of type, Pochettino wrote a series of motivational phrases, some of his creation and some by others.

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Growth is often painful, for it means saying goodbye to the person you used to be.

The talent has brought us here, but it is heart, effort, and unity that will make us unforgettable.

Heart turns effort into belief — and when everything hurts, heart keeps us fighting together.

“I think every single quote represents our journey from day one to today and beyond,” he said.

They’re also more proof of how Pochettino values the psychological side of the sport, a factor that’s even more important with national teams than it is with clubs.

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National teams can’t buy players to boost their talent the way clubs can, especially Pochettino’s previous employers at England’s Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur and France’s Paris Saint-Germain. If a national team’s top players aren’t delivering, all the manager can do is drop them, call in other players, and hope they do enough.

That’s what happened after the Nations League failure.

“Maybe we didn’t feel or see how difficult the process was going to be,” Pochettino said. “We were so naive when we signed our contract. … We misjudged the situation — it was worse than we really believed.”

He and the assistants he brought with him came in believing that the players would immediately be as all-in on working toward the World Cup as the staff.

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“And then we arrived here, we received a big punch,” he said, mimicking it, “and we were knocked out for a while.”

Pochettino was, as he relayed in these remarks with an expletive, shocked.

“We were so excited about that, because it was so close to the World Cup,” he said. He expected in turn that people would be “desperate to help everyone, to be involved, come to the national team. And what’s the opposite?”

He felt it as soon as he took charge in the fall of 2024. By the time the Nations League final four arrived, he said “that punch, we expected” — words as damning as any he has said in his tenure.

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“I think it was more a plan to have this punch that was painful, but it was necessary for people to realize in which place we were,” Pochettino said. “For the players to realize that this way, it was impossible to arrive in a good condition to the World Cup.”

We’ll never know what would have happened if the U.S. had won the Nations League title with its stars playing well. But because it didn’t, Pochettino moved quickly to start tearing things down, bringing in a slate of new players to challenge incumbents from the summer’s Gold Cup into the autumn.

There were a lot of questions along the way, and among outsiders, uncertainty as to whether the move would pay off. But when the Americans beat Japan in September, they showed they had reached the corner to turn around. Over the ensuing months, they got there.

Now, Pochettino has a galvanized group, and some of its biggest names have led the way in the World Cup. The U.S. might not be able to win it all, but there’s no questioning the players’ commitment now.

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At one point, Pochettino was asked how much he has learned about American culture in the job. He has been asked that a few times in his tenure, and unfortunately hasn’t had much to answer with — not least because he and his staff don’t live in the United States.

This time, he had more to say.

“People are very approachable, they make you feel comfortable, it’s very welcoming,” he said. “You go to some place like Nashville and you go to a bar, and if you are alone, you make friends so quick. And it looks like in a few minutes, you belong that in that place.”

That, he said, “was a massive surprise. … Different states and everything, but you have the same essence of the human being.”

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If it’s tempting to want such a message that can resonate in a divided country — especially during a unifying event like a World Cup — it bears saying that Pochettino probably hasn’t experienced the full depths of what has caused the divisions.

But conversations with people who know him bring up a reminder: He’s one of many foreign visitors, especially from his native Argentina, who look up to the United States culturally and see the good before the bad.

“The country is massive and the people are so good,” Pochettino said. “I think we’ve learned a lot, I think we are much better people now, knowing the country and the culture of the people here.”

He made a wisecrack about America’s reputation for junk food, a subject that the world has lived out in coming to our shores this summer. (Ask the Netherlands fans who went to Buc-ee’s, a famed Southern convenience store chain.)

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“People say Americans have no healthy food. Yes, you have healthy food,” citing a trip he took to a Whole Foods supermarket. “But also you have the food that makes you feel, you know, like Chick-fil-A.”

He even said at one point that “when you are here, I think it’s difficult now to see yourself living in another place” and that “we will miss” the country.

That opened the door to ask if he’d like to stay in the job after his contract ends following the World Cup. There have been some discussions with U.S. Soccer, but the widespread presumption remains that he’ll go.

He avoided a direct answer, saying his focus now is on the World Cup.

“And then if we want to stay, we have months to talk, or days or weeks, because it’s four years until the next World Cup, he said, later adding: “We told the federation we are open, but now I think it’s not to be distracted.”

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