When Mauricio Pochettino signed on to rebuild the U.S. Men’s National Team nearly two years ago, he arrived with the swagger of a coach who’d thrived in the pressure cookers of Europe’s biggest clubs. He expected hunger. He expected a roster desperate to prove itself on a home World Cup stage. What he found instead was something that knocked the wind out of him.
“We were so naive when we signed our contract,”Pochettino admitted during a media roundtable at his Dana Point office this week, overlooking the Pacific coast where surfers wait endlessly for the perfect wave. It’s a metaphor he understands deeply: he doesn’t wait for waves. He makes them. But the American soccer program he inherited—fresh off a humiliating Copa America group-stage exit despite playing at home—was saturated with complacency, not urgency.“It was worse than we really believed,”he said.
The irony is brutal. Pochettino assumed the proximity of a home World Cup would galvanize players and staff alike. Instead, he encountered the opposite. Players weren’t exactly lining up to answer the call. The culture he needed to build didn’t exist. So he did what he’s always done: he went to work. He identified the players willing to buy into his vision, challenged them relentlessly—including a famously heated halftime speech during a friendly with Australia—and slowly forged something new. In November, he introduced the phrase that would become the team’s north star:“Why not us?”Simple. Direct. A mindset shift disguised as three words.
The results have been stunning. The USMNT opened the 2026 World Cup with back-to-back victories over Paraguay and Australia by a combined 6-1 score—a historic start for a program that had never opened 2-0 and had won just one knockout match in its entire World Cup history. They’re now hosting knockout rounds in Northern California next week, with a genuinely plausible path to the deepest American run since 1930.
What Pochettino’s journey reveals is something rarely discussed in soccer: culture isn’t inherited; it’s built. And it takes longer than most people expect. His team’s success wasn’t inevitable. It required a coach willing to be stunned, to reassess, and to persist through losses in the Nations League and a Gold Cup failure without Christian Pulisic. Those defeats mattered because they provided the crucible where real change happens. The fall of 2025 became the turning point—not because the results suddenly improved, but because the players finally internalized what their coach had been demanding all along.
As for what comes next, Pochettino remains coy. He’s been linked with European club jobs, but standing in his office overlooking the California coast with“Why not us?”emblazoned on the wall behind him, he admits something unexpected: it’s getting harder to imagine leaving. The American chapter has changed him in ways he didn’t anticipate—from discovering Chick-Fil-A and Whole Foods to developing a genuine appreciation for Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley. He’s not just rebuilt a team. He’s been rebuilt by it.
About the Author
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
