Mauricio Pochettino said Tuesday night that he and his staff were naïve when they signed with the U.S. Soccer Federation in 2024, describing the early mood around the United States men's national team as a shock that forced a reset. He said they expected people to be desperate to help, but found the opposite, and called the reaction a big punch.
That blunt assessment lands now because the USMNT has already clinched the top spot in Group D with one match to spare, after beating Paraguay 4-1 and Australia 2-0 in its first two World Cup games. Pochettino is not talking about a team that merely stumbled into results. He is talking about a side that had to be rebuilt while it was being asked to win.
Pochettino said the turnaround began with a process of analyzing the squad and identifying players who could fit the standard he wanted, including Alex Freeman and Sebastian Berhalter. In his telling, the point was not just to add names, but to create competition so that no place was automatic and reputation alone could not carry a player through the door.
The harder lesson came earlier in 2025, when the USMNT lost two matches in the 2025 Concacaf Nations League final. Pochettino said those defeats were necessary, however painful, because they forced the players to understand that their approach was not enough. He framed that setback as the kind of blow that can change a group faster than any speech.
He took that message into a team meeting in November of 2025, when he introduced the idea of Why not us? and pointed to South Korea’s run to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup and Morocco’s surprise march to the 2022 World Cup semifinals. He said the message was simple: belief had to be paired with work, or it meant nothing. “We can,” he told the group in substance. “If we believe we can, we can do. If we work hard, we can do. If we change our mindset, we can do.”
That shift has changed the way the team looks and, by Pochettino’s account, the way it feels. He said he has noticed a greater connection with fans, and he contrasted that with what he described as painful scenes at the 2025 Gold Cup, when 70,000 fans of Mexico filled the stadium. The contrast underlines how much of this cycle has been about reclaiming a sense of belonging as much as improving the soccer.
Now the question is less whether the USMNT belongs in the knockout conversation and more whether this culture change can survive the next step. The team will face Turkiye in its Group D finale on Thursday, with the bracket already secured and Pochettino still pushing the same message: the results matter, but the standard matters more.
