In one way, no matter what happens the rest of the World Cup, Mauricio Pochettino has been an undeniable and unprecedented success.
See Pochettino, the 54-year-old Argentine coach of the U.S. national team, American soccer’s $6 million man, has not only accomplished what no other Team USA coach has, he has done what no one else, certainly no American, has been able to do since what, the 50s?
Certainly not since a miraculous weekend in February 1980.
This summer, at the largest and most expensive World Cup in history, on the eve of the country’s 250th birthday that has left some questioning how or even if they should celebrate, Pochettino has put the “United” back into the United States of America.
Every few days, for 90 minutes – plus hydration breaks – a deeply divided nation has forgotten about the war in Iran, the price at the pump and come together around this daring and entertaining side Pochettino has created. The defender from Birmingham, Alabama, the superstar from Hershey, PA, the midfielder from Wappingers Falls, the field general from Little Elm, Texas, a true America’s Team, joining them in the most basic and original of American pursuits.
To dream.
“America,” U.S. midfielder Weston McKennie said, “is built on belief.”
Pochettino has made belief the foundation of not only his rebuilding of an underachieving U.S. program into a team that has already made history at this World Cup, with the promise of even bigger triumphs to come, but for the nation that has rallied behind it.
It is fitting that Pochettino’s unified nation has chosen (or borrowed from Manchester United) as this summer’s anthem a song about destination – John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
In this case, the place where Pochettino feels Team USA belongs is the World Cup final at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium July 19. Never mind that the U.S., which won its first round group for the first time since 2010 and opens knockout stage play with a Round of 32 match against Bosnia and Herzegovina Wednesday at Santa Clara’s Levi Stadium, has only won one World Cup knockout phase match in its history.
“We need to believe we can win the World Cup,” he said.
During the World Cup draw at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., last December, Pochettino ran into President Trump.
“What do you think, coach. Can you win the World Cup?” Trump asked recalled Pochettino.
“Of course, Mr. President,” Pochettino responded.
He has a similar conversation repeatedly with his team.
“Why not us? Why not us? Why not us?” he told the team during a March training camp. “We need to really believe that we can be there. We need to dream.”
It is a belief that was evident in Team USA’s first two World Cup matches, victories against Paraguay and Australia.
“Listen is the U.S. going to win it? Probably not,” said Wayne Rooney, the former England and Manchester United superstar, now a commentator for the BBC. “He is sending a message, and I think you can feel that. … That’s why he is a top manager, his players believe they can win it.”
EL LOCO
This American dream, like so many others, begins in the dead of night in a faraway land.
It was a winter’s night in 1987, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., when there was a knock on the door of the small, prefab house in Murphy, population 3,500, a quiet and dusty farming and railroad town in Argentina’s Santa Fe province, 250 miles west of Buenos Aires.
“My parents were frightened,” Pochettino said.
But Hector Pochettino, a farm hand who coached youth soccer on the side, recognized one of the two men standing at his front door, Jorge Griffa, the academy director for Newell’s Old Boys, one of Argentina’s top clubs. So he opened the door. Standing next to Griffa was Marcelo Bielsa, a towering, odd looking man, who was the club’s reserve team coach. The two men had been on a scouting trip through the area when they stopped for a late dinner with some local coaches before heading back to Rosario, the club’s home. One of the coaches said the area’s best prospect was Hector Pochettino’s then 13-year-old son Mauricio.
So now, after stopping at a gas station for directions, Griffa and Bielsa were led by Hector and his wife, Amalia, to their son’s bedroom. Bielsa asked to see the boy’s legs. Amalia lifted the blankets off her still sound asleep son.
Bielsa nodded.
“He has the makings of a footballer,” he said of the boy.
The next morning, Amalia recounted the moment to her skeptical son.
“Yeah, come on, it was in your dream,” Pochettino recalled telling his mother. “What did you drink before you went to sleep?”
The story of Mauricio Pochettino cannot be told without starting with Marcelo Bielsa. And so this American dream, the growing belief spreading across a divided nation that Pochettino, 54, can lead Team USA deeper, way deeper into this World Cup than any other U.S. side before it, starts with Bielsa.
Bielsa, Pochettino said, “is my football father.”
It was Bielsa who signed Pochettino for Newell’s Old Boys. It was Bielsa, as Argentina’s national team coach, who selected Pochettino for all 20 of his appearances for Argentina.
More than anything, it was Bielsa who instilled in Pochettino his core belief.
“We don’t set ourselves any limits,” Pochettino said, “we dream big.”
For decades, Bielsa, now coaching Uruguay in this World Cup, has been referred to by critics and admirers as El Loco, a nickname that he views not so much as a slight as a badge of honor.
“A man with new ideas is a madman,” he once said, “until his ideas triumph.”
Like Bielsa, Pochettino was undeterred by those who questioned his decision to take the U.S. job.
“We need to keep believing and approach every single day from the way we approached Day One,” Pochettino said. “Believing we can win, knowing we have to work hard but knowing at the same time we have to join the time together, believe in every day in our journey.”
THE SHERIFF AND THE COWBOY
Travelers on National Route 33 are welcomed to Murphy with a billboard on the town’s edge.
“MURPHY: Embajadores De Buen Futbol.” Ambassadors of Good Football. Below the slogan are photos of Murphy’s native sons who have gone on to play professional soccer, including Pochettino.
The town was founded by a dreamer, a 19th Century madman with new ideas. John James Murphy was 22 and all but broke when he hitched a ride in Ireland’s County Wexford to a boat to Liverpool in 1844, the eve of the Great Famine. From Liverpool, he sailed on a bark to South America, convinced a fortune awaited him in Argentina. At first, he dug ditches and worked as a shepherd not far from where the town that bears his name now sits. Eventually, Murphy built a real estate empire that made him one of the biggest land owners in the region.
Twenty years later, Matteo Pochettino left the Piedmont region of Italy for Argentina. The Pochettinos would also leave their mark on the area. Mauricio Pochettino’s grandfather served as the town sheriff. His family’s history and his own hard-tackling, take-no-prisoners style of play earned Pochettino a nickname that stuck with him through his playing career, El Sheriff.
Pochettino grew up around the area’s farms and ranches. “I am a cowboy,” he said laughing, recounting his days of riding bulls. “Baby bulls.” He was more likely found on the town’s dry and bumpy pitches or kicking a ball against the house, breaking windows, Amalia later recalled.
Not long after Bielsa and Griffa’s late-night scouting trip, Pochettino joined Newell’s Old Boys. He signed a pro contract at 16 and made his debut in Argentina’s Primera Division at 17. Together with Bielsa, by then the team’s head coach, Newell’s won a pair of Argentina titles and reached the final of the Copa Libertadores, the South American club championship. It was Bielsa who decided to room his rising star with Diego Maradona for six months during 1993-94.
Maradona, FIFA’s Player of the Century with Pele, was trying to regain his form and a spot on Argentina’s 1994 World Cup squad after serving a 15-month suspension for testing positive for cocaine.
“He was key in my career as a player and key in (teaching me) to love the game,” Pochettino said of Bielsa. “He inspired me to keep pushing, to keep trying to be a coach.”
In a recent interview with Four Four Two magazine, Pochettino said, “Bielsa means a great deal to me. I’m emotionally shaped by everything he did for me. More than a teacher, he was someone who pushed you to discover new things.”
Bielsa, in one of his first moves after being named coach of the Argentina national team, brought Pochettino into the side for his international debut in March 1999. He scored his first goal for Argentina that November.
But Pochettino’s Argentina career is best remembered for a controversial call shortly before halftime in a group stage match with bitter rival England at the 2002 World Cup.
“I know very well what it’s like to play in a World Cup,” he said. “I know disappointment.”
In the most anticipated match of the tournament, a rematch of a controversial Argentina victory in the 1998 World Cup, the Falklands War from 20 years earlier still fresh in many Argentine minds, England forward Michael Owen tried to dribble around Pochettino just inside the 18-yard box before falling to the pitch.
Italian referee Pierluigi Collina ruled that Pochettino had tripped Owen and awarded England a penalty, which David Beckham converted in the 44th minute for the match’s only goal. Argentina did not make it out of the tournament’s first round. Replays suggest that with today’s VAR system, Collina’s call would have been overturned.
“After that, I suffered a massive depression,” Pochettino said.
Years later, when Pochettino was managing Southampton in England’s Premier League, he learned that Owen, then a TV commentator, was visiting the club.
Pochettino found a photo that showed he hadn’t fouled Owen and asked the England star to sign it.
“You definitely touched me,” Owen wrote next his drawing of a smiley face.
The pair laughed.
THE SEED
From Newell’s Old Boys, Pochettino joined Espanyol, Barcelona’s other club. In a 1997 match, Pochettino’s marking of Ronaldo was the difference in Espanyol’s first victory against their crosstown rival in a decade. There were also stints at Paris Saint-Germain and Bordeaux in France’s Ligue 1 and then back to Espanyol before retiring in 2006.
He earned a master’s degree in sports management but decided to trade a desk for a place on the sideline, a move again influenced by Bielsa.
“He planted the seed in our minds,” Pochettino said. “Everyone follows their own path, but it’s no coincidence so many of us with Bielsa at Newell’s discovered our vocation on the touchline.”
Bielsa, ever the contrarian, has downplayed his influence on Pochettino.
“He has built his own career as a head coach,” Bielsa said of Pochettino while speaking to reporters in 2019. “He has built his own style. It’s his property. What his team does is more linked to his ideas than the ideas of other teams.
“That’s why I disagree with the position of teacher. I’m not his teacher because Pochettino’s style is an original one; he designed and drew it up himself.”
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Pochettino was hired to coach Espanyol in January 2009, his only coaching experience was working as an assistant for the club’s women’s team. At the time, Espanyol was in a relegation battle. Pochettino not only kept the club from being relegated, he also guided Espanyol to its first victory against FC Barcelona in their rival’s Camp Nou stadium in 27 years.
Three years later, feuding with club directors over funding and the team at the bottom of the La Liga standings, Pochettino was fired, replaced by past and now present Mexico national team coach Javier Aguirre. He moved on to Southampton in the Premier League. In 2013-14, Pochettino’s first full season in charge, the Saints finished eighth in the Premier League, their highest finish in 12 years, and with their highest point total since the creation of the league in 1992-93.
But it was at Tottenham Hotspur, the North London giant and one of the Premier League’s so-called Big Six clubs, that Pochettino first gained global attention with an attractive and entertaining style that featured Harry Kane, who under the Argentine emerged as one of his generation’s most lethal strikers.
Spurs were in contention for the league title until the 2015-16 season’s final weeks, eventually finishing third, the club’s highest league finish in 26 years. They were league runner-ups the following season, their best finish since 1962-63, and then in 2019, Pochettino led Tottenham to its first – and still only – UEFA Champions League final, losing to Liverpool.
Five months later, with Spurs 14th in the league table and Pochettino complaining about a lack of financial support, he was fired.
Pochettino coached Paris Saint-Germain to the Ligue 1 title in 2021-22 but couldn’t capture the Champions League crown expected of a team that included eight-time world player of the year Lionel Messi, France World Cup hero Kylian Mbappe, and Brazil’s Neymar, and that July left the club.
He lasted a dysfunctional season at Chelsea before agreeing in September 2024 after a U.S. Soccer search that included multiple conversations with former Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp. With an annual salary of $6 million, a significant chunk of which comes from a donation by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, a longtime U.S. Soccer supporter, Pochettino is Team USA’s highest paid coach ever and one of the highest paid national team coaches in the world. Pochettino, who has been linked to jobs at some of Europe’s biggest teams, most prominently AC Milan, has been offered a four-year extension by U.S. Soccer. A decision will not be made until after the World Cup.
“I think they hired the right guy,” said Marcelo Balboa, who played in three World Cups for the U.S. “I think he came in with the right mentality.”
SOMETHING SPECIAL
Do you believe in miracles? Pochettino does.
He is a superstitious man. He keeps a box of lemons on his desk, believing the citrus absorbs the energy around it. He gets rid of the fruit when it turns “ugly” from absorbing too much negative energy.
He is also a deeply religious man. Pochettino wears a silver medal of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, on a woven bracelet on his right wrist.
During his first season coaching Espanyol, with the club in danger of being relegated, he hiked 7.5 miles to Montserrat, a religious shrine outside of Barcelona, to pray that the team stayed up.
“It worked,” he said.
Since taking the U.S. job, Pochettino has also become a fan of “Miracle,” the 2004 film recounting the Miracle on Ice, the story of how the U.S. men’s ice hockey team, made up of unknown college kids and led by an uncompromising coach, knocked off the heavily favored Soviet Union en route to winning the gold medal at the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid.
Like that team’s coach, Herb Brooks, Pochettino set the tone early in his tenure as U.S. boss.
Pulisic, complaining about a long season with AC Milan, asked to skip a series of Team USA friendlies last year but still be allowed to play in the CONCACAF Gold Cup. Instead, Pulisic was left off the Gold Cup roster.
“When he came in, he laid the law down,” Balboa said. “He made it very clear: ‘This is how we’re going to play, this is my team. If you can fit into this, great. If you can’t, you can’t.’
“I think we saw the big battle right before Gold Cup when Christian didn’t get called in, that whole story. He let everybody know right there, this is how it’s done here. I’m the man, I’m the boss, it’s my job on the line, this is how it’s going to work.”
“He’s had that intensity, he’s had that different personality, a bit different passion, I feel like,” said Alex Freeman, a U.S. defender. “He’s one of those guys who puts his mind into something, and that’s how he wants it. For me, it’s how can I apply that to my game, knowing that it’s a different philosophy than maybe I’ve been used to before.”
But also like Brooks, Pochettino has instilled a belief in his players that anything is possible.
“We can do something special,” he said.
And now he has a nation united in that belief.
“You’re playing for yourself, yes, and for your family and the people around you,” U.S. defender Auston Trusty said. “But also for the whole country and for soccer in America.”
In moments immediately after a 2-0 U.S. victory against Australia in Seattle June 19 that clinched a spot in the Round of 32, Pochettino could feel the nation behind him, sharing his belief, clearly touched as the crowd chanted his name.
“MAU-RI-CIO POCH-E-TTINO!!!”
“MAU-RI-CIO POCH-E-TTINO!!!”
“Even if I am not American,” he said later, “after the game I was emotional.”
He seemed to not want to let go of the moment. Near midfield, in the center of the post-match celebratory chaos, he grabbed longtime U.S. soccer press officer Michael Kammerman and embraced him. Then, as “Take Me Home Country Roads” played over the stadium’s sound system, Pochettino began dancing with Kammerman like he was a cowboy at a dance hall on a Saturday night back in Murphy. As the song turned into the chorus, he faced a group of fans in the end zone and joined them in shouting “to the place I belong!” thrusting his right arm, the silver medallion of St. Christopher, over his head and then forward, pointing off into the distance.
The traveler and his nation of dreamers still had places to go.