Mauricio Pochettino arrived in the US men’s national team job with as sterling a résumé as anyone to take charge of the program, and boasted in his introduction to US media that he believed the team could win the 2026 World Cup, due to be hosted at home along with Canada and Mexico.
It sounded like the start of a revolution. His first squad, named last week, was anything but.
Despite multiple injuries giving him ample opportunities to shake things up, the collection of players that have gathered this international window could just as conceivably been called by his predecessor Gregg Berhalter. There are no uncapped players among the 25 that will mark the start of the Pochettino era this Saturday against Panama and on Tuesday against Mexico. The most surprising inclusion may be either goalkeeper Zack Steffen – who returns to the team after being the starter for much of the run-up to the 2022 World Cup, and Marlon Fossey, whose most likely role on this team is as right back depth behind Sergiño Dest, once he returns from injury. For a window that’s supposed to be all about change, US fans have seen most of these guys before, often multiple times.
What could be seen as underwhelming could instead be revealing. With familiar faces on the field, the focus will be almost entirely on what comes from the sideline. More than any individual player, this window will be a test of Pochettino and the staff he brought with him from his broadly successful stops at PSG, Chelsea, Tottenham and Espanyol.
“I feel like we’ve already learned a lot,” midfielder Brenden Aaronson told reporters on Thursday. “One thing we know for sure is the intensity we want to play with. We want to play with high intensity, play in the other team’s half, have possession of the ball, and yeah I think what he wants is just a confident team.”
That Pochettino has precious little time to instill that confidence is one of many new obstacles he’s facing as a first-time international manager.
Most pressingly, a raft of key players are unavailable due to injury, with no transfer market to rely on for replacements and no chance to make a game-time decision for injuries that may be healed and ready by Saturday or Tuesday. Seven players from the 2024 Copa America squad (Gio Reyna, Folarin Balogun, Tim Weah, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Tyler Adams, Luca de la Torre and Chris Richards) will miss this window with various ailments, as will presumed starter Sergiño Dest as he continues his recovery from an ACL tear. In a cruel twist, several of the young and unproven players that might have had an opportunity in their absence are also out through injury or recovery (Kevin Paredes, Cade Cowell, and Caleb Wiley among them).
Pochettino must also work out how to integrate players in varying levels of club form into a cohesive whole. Within this USMNT roster alone, he will have the services of two leaders currently enjoying strong runs, with Christian Pulisic emerging as a key force for AC Milan and Weston McKennie essentially forcing Juventus to hang on to him despite a summer of speculation that he’d be sold. Pochettino will also be overseeing players in need of a jumpstart like Tanner Tessman, who has only started once since arriving at Lyon on a big transfer from Venezia and was a healthy scratch for a recent game against Rangers, and Yunus Musah, who has struggled to hold a consistent place in the same AC Milan team as Pulisic.
Then there are the goalkeepers, who are either unproven at the top international level (Patrick Schulte), in poor form (Ethan Horvath, who hasn’t presided over a shutout since April), second-choice for his club (Matt Turner), or still looking to recapture the consistent level that made him a national team player in the first place (Steffen).
If Pochettino can take this shorthanded group and lead them to better performances than what we saw in the Copa América, the entire narrative and momentum around this team changes.
“That’s the part of the job as a manager is how do you get those guys to all be on the same page, coming from all different areas of the world and all different styles of teams and leagues,” defender Tim Ream said on Wednesday. “They have to manage the travel, the minutes played, the teams that guys are playing against, and try and marry all of those things into one solid group and put personalities and people together.”
With that in mind, it’s either a very good or a very bad thing that the US will be pitted against the teams that they are in this window. In Panama, they’ll face the side that effectively, if not officially, authored their downfall in the Copa America with a surprising 2-1 win in the second group game, setting up the fateful do-or-die test against Uruguay, a loss that was always going to be an uphill battle for the US
In international football, such a one-off result is likely to hold sway over a team for some time – look no further than the repeated invocations of Couva in meetings between Trinidad and Tobago and the United States over the last seven years. After T&T blocked the US path to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the US didn’t get a chance at revenge until 2019. Saturday’s meeting with Panama comes with a gap of just three and a half months. A win, decisive or otherwise, would help prove that this is indeed a new era. Any other result, almost regardless of performance, will delay the onset of those good feelings a little bit longer.
The window doesn’t get much less meaningful from there. While Mexico’s men’s national team has been beset by indifferent-to-bad performances for the last few years, talent-wise they remain the United States’ primary rivals in the region. The cultural and historic touchstones are ever-present, even in a friendly. The best-case scenario is a win that maintains the current status quo. Any other result, and there will be an argument that Pochettino may have taken on a bigger project than initially thought.
“It’s always an important match for us,” said striker Josh Sargent of the matchup with Mexico, which will be a rare away friendly against the rival. “But especially with a new manager, you want to get off on the right foot and get a couple wins under our belt.
Results aren’t often the goal in friendlies – the noncompetitive nature of them means they are usually a place for processes to take hold more than anything else. This window, though, is one where that thinking doesn’t apply. It isn’t about the stakes – It’s about the new leader of a high-potential team, and his only chance at a first impression.
