Is becoming USMNT head coach the right move for Mauricio Pochettino?

In late 2022, out of work following his departure from Paris Saint-Germain that summer, Mauricio Pochettino found himself reflecting on the unpredictable nature of a coaching career.

“Football is timing,” he told Spain’s Radio Marca. “It’s about the moments that coincide and then for that marriage to happen. Sometimes it is only a question of time. I don’t believe in trains passing only once. I think sometimes you need the patience and you have to know how to wait.”

The “train” he was referring to was the Real Madrid job. The timing had not been right when they sounded him out in the summer of 2018, given he had just signed a five-year contract at Tottenham Hotspur, but by the end of the following year he was out of work. The stars never quite aligned for him with Manchester United either, despite a long on-off courtship. He ended up coaching PSG and then Chelsea, where he lasted 18 months and a year respectively.

And now, to widespread surprise, Pochettino is on the verge of becoming the new coach of the United States men’s national team, enthused by the challenge of leading them into the 2026 World Cup they will host most of. If you had asked him five years ago, even two years ago, it probably wouldn’t have been a position he envisaged taking at the age of 52. But football is timing. The past years have taught him that.

It is an unexpected leap from Pochettino — away from the Premier League, away from the Champions League circuit and away from European club football, where he has worked as a player and then a coach since he left his native Argentina to join Barcelona-based Espanyol as a 22-year-old in the summer of 1994.

It is a prestigious job, particularly given the looming prospect of a World Cup played primarily on American soil. It is the type of challenge Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Jose Mourinho and others have often said might tempt them at some distant juncture — just not now, as Klopp made clear when the U.S. federation sounded him out this summer in the early stages of his post-Liverpool sabbatical.

For Pochettino to take the jump at this point in his career underlines not only the appeal of the challenge in question but also, perhaps, a level of disillusionment with the European club scene.

Pochettino suffered bad timing at Chelsea last season (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)

His reputation as one of the world’s brightest coaches was built on spells at Espanyol, and then Southampton and Tottenham in England, three clubs where he found a vision and an energy that appeared to chime with his own. In terms of showcasing his coaching ability, all three seemed like the right jobs at the right time.

PSG, by contrast, had begun to resemble a circus by the time he took that job in early 2021; “flashy bling-bling” is how club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi described the dressing-room culture the following year. Chelsea have so far appeared pretty much unmanageable in two turbulent years under the co-ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.

Wrong place, wrong time. Twice.

There were talks with the Manchester United hierarchy after he left Chelsea at the end of last season, but he received little encouragement before learning that Erik ten Hag was to be kept on after all. A wide range of coaches attracted interest from Bayern Munich and Barcelona before they appointed Vincent Kompany and Hansi Flick respectively. Pochettino did not seem to be among them.

In comparison to the fresh-faced figure who arrived on the Premier League scene more than a decade earlier, he seemed a little jaded at times at Chelsea. He certainly found it harder to get his tactical message across than he had at Southampton and Spurs, where young players gave the impression they would happily run through walls for him.

But perhaps it was less about Pochettino and more about the state of dysfunction he encountered at his past two clubs.

As his time at Chelsea headed towards a predictable break-up, there was a sense a young team had begun to turn a corner. They lost just one of their final 15 Premier League games last season, scoring 39 goals in the process, and won their final five to secure a sixth-placed finish and European qualification. Several of their players reacted to his departure by expressing shock or sadness on social media. Their Senegal international forward Nicolas Jackson posted a “facepalm” emoji and wrote, “Love you, coach. Wish we could stay together more.”

This is what the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) is buying into: a coach who tends to win hearts and minds — young, fresh, enthusiastic minds in particular — and to impose his playing philosophy. His high-energy, high-pressing, possession-based style is far more mainstream now than when he brought it to the Premier League in early 2013, but even if his principles are similar to USMNT predecessor Gregg Berhalter’s, it seems like a bold as well as highly ambitious, eye-catching appointment by the USSF, whose technical director, Matt Crocker, briefly overlapped with Pochettino at Southampton.

A fresh-faced Pochettino with Southampton in 2013 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

International football is a strange beast. Many successful club coaches have proven less suited to that version of the game — far less about the tactical challenge and far more about the rhythm of the calendar, where they go months without seeing their players or spending time on the training field, then find themselves plunged into a tournament where the tests are so much harder, the stakes so much higher and the pressure ramped up dramatically.

Pochettino has the emotional intelligence to be able to adjust to those different dynamics and connect with players in a different way. There are unlikely to be many coaches at the 2026 World Cup with more elite-level management experience — not that this is all-important, as Spain’s Luis de la Fuente, Lionel Scaloni of Argentina and England’s recently departed Gareth Southgate have demonstrated of late.

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The English FA has considered Pochettino in the past and, despite a preference for a homegrown candidate, was expected to do so again following Southgate’s exit last month after Euro 2024. Instead, having considered the free agents on the market, they have just put their under-21s team coach Lee Carsley in interim charge of the senior side, perhaps with an eye on continuity post-Southgate rather than the type of game-changing appointment the USSF had in mind from the start of this process.

It is easy to imagine that, in Pochettino, the USSF have found a coach who could not just improve the national team but further energise the sport in America; someone who can change the culture around the entire national team setup and bring long-term benefits.

Equally, it is possible to imagine him getting itchy feet as he counts down the months towards the 2026 World Cup and the challenge of trying, in those sporadic international breaks, to transform a squad that contains plenty of young talent but which fell so far short of expectations by failing to get past the group stage at this summer’s Copa America, beaten by Panama as well as Uruguay.

There is a lot of work to do to get the USMNT up to speed — specifically to Pochettino speed — by summer 2026. Conversely, though that is nearly two years off, there is not an awful lot of time in which to do it.

That is the strange thing about international football. Anything he does between now and then can be filed under experimentation. Then the World Cup will arrive, expectations will be high and judgements will be made on the validity (and value) of the Pochettino project.

At “flashy” PSG in 2021 (Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)

It is easy to see why so many leading coaches tend to regard international football as something that can wait until they are at the tail-end of their careers. But sometimes, as Pochettino said, it is about how moments and opportunities coincide.

Looking beyond finance, if he is inclined to feel any regrets over his choices of PSG and Chelsea, there must be something that has convinced him this is an opportunity that will engage and excite him for the foreseeable future and re-energise his career in the longer term.

Perhaps it comes back to something he said while he was in Qatar, working as a pundit for the BBC during the 2022 World Cup. He spoke about how excited and enthused he felt by the feeling around the competition — probably pretty easy for an Argentinian at that tournament — and how, yes, having appeared in the World Cup as a player in 2002, he would love to do so as a coach in the future.

At the time, it was presumed he meant by taking charge of Argentina — or even England, such is the way he’d come to be regarded as an Anglophile since his arrival on these shores over 11 years ago.

Instead, he has now been lured Stateside, just as his compatriot Lionel Messi, now 37, was when he joined Inter Miami of MLS last year, just as German veteran Marco Reus, 35, has been now that his move to LA Galaxy in the same league has been confirmed.

In some ways, Pochettino’s move feels more unexpected because it’s all happened in a matter of days rather than being flagged months or even years in advance.

Football is timing, as Pochettino said.

Perhaps the past few years have taught him something different about coaching careers and the difficulty of trying to plan too far ahead.

Sometimes the opportunity to board a particular train doesn’t come along again.

Pochettino didn’t want to hang about waiting. He is evidently enthused by the journey that lies ahead, wherever it may take him.

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(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)