‘He wants to win.’ How U.S. Soccer landed star coach Mauricio Pochettino

AUSTIN, Texas —  Before new coach Mauricio Pochettino had even left the locker room for one of his first training sessions with the U.S. men’s soccer team, many of his players already were bathed in sweat.

Under Pochettino, even stretching has taken on a new emphasis.

“Everything feels a little bit more intense,” forward Ricardo Pepi said after one practice. “The exercises all have a purpose. Everything has a purpose.”

“Anything we do,” forward Josh Sargent added, “he wants it to be intense. That’s the big message so far.”

U.S. soccer coach Mauricio Pochettino and first assistant coach Jesus Perez wait for their player before training Friday in Austin, Texas. Pochettino will coach his first U.S. match on Saturday.

(Rodolfo Gonzalez / Associated Press)

But that’s not the only message the new coach has delivered in his first week with the U.S. During team meetings, on the practice field and in the individual visits that have spanned anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour, another theme has become obvious to the 25 players invited to Pochettino’s first camp.

“He wants to win,” defender Tim Ream said. “He has his principles. He has his ideas. But at the end of the day, it’s about winning.”

Pochettino has done a lot of that, first as a defender with clubs in Argentina, Spain and France and with the Argentine national team, then later as a manager with Southampton, Tottenham, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea. He’ll get his chance to build on that Saturday when the U.S. meets Panama at Q2 Stadium in Austin in his first game as a national team coach. The team will then fly to Guadalajara for a friendly with Mexico on Tuesday.

Yet his hiring last month represents something of a gamble for a U.S. Soccer Federation that hasn’t gone outside the country for a men’s national team coach in more than three decades.

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“A lot of this was new for us, right?,” said JT Batson, U.S. Soccer’s chief executive. “This was a big project and a big process and one where you had to get all the things right.”

Especially given the timing. The World Cup is returning to the U.S. in less than two years, leaving the federation with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to spark widespread interest in soccer. If the Americans make a deep run in the tournament, the thinking goes, the fans and sponsorship dollars will follow.

An early exit, on the other hand, and interest will wane.

“That’s a huge thing for us,” Batson said. “People need to believe in what we’re doing and be excited and motivated to carry the sport on the positive trajectory that it’s on.”

Pochettino wasn’t hired so much to continue the program’s trajectory as much as he was to transform it. The team stagnated under Gregg Berhalter, who had the best winning percentage of any U.S. coach in history in his first four years, but then lost nearly as often as he won in the last two. After a disastrous performance in last summer’s Copa América, where the U.S. was eliminated in the group stage, Berhalter was sacked.

“We had a stretch of tough results,” Christian Pulisic, one of Berhalter’s most vocal backers, said before Friday’s training session. “I guess the change was needed and that’s what we got. Now we have a bit of a change and the only thing we can do is look forward, bring the excitement back and go out and get results.”

Making a change was only half the equation though. To get the team back on track, the federation had to hire someone better than Berhalter. So Batson and Matt Crocker, U.S. Soccer’s sporting director who led the search for the new coach, cast a wide net, starting with a list of more than 100 candidates.

Mauricio Pochettino was coaching Chelsea before parting ways with the club and eventually landing the job leading the U.S. men’s national team.

(Alastair Grant / Associated Press)

That list quickly was whittled down, with the remaining names placed in three buckets — two of which, ESPN reported, were considered either “reach” or “super stretch” candidates.

At the top of that second list was former Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp, who quickly declined the job. But as word spread that U.S. Soccer — buoyed by annual commercial revenue that could top $200 million, according to Inside World Football — was being ambitious in its search, others expressed interest.

Soon the list of candidates reportedly included Herve Renard, coach of France’s women’s team; former England manager Gareth Southgate; former Nice and Crystal Palace coach Patrick Vieira; and well-traveled German manager Thomas Tuchel, who has coached at some of the biggest clubs in Europe, among them Borussia Dortmund, PSG, Chelsea and Bayern Munich.

“The organization is in a radically different place than it was a couple of years ago and that means the types of candidates that are interested evolve,” Batson said. “Our organization was in a much stronger position. You had this general excitement about the team, about the growth of the sport, the opportunities going forward.

“When you layer those things together, the types of folks who were answering your phone call this time around was different. We wanted to make sure that we had a plan to make the most of that.”

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The plan was guided in large part with data compiled by U.S. Soccer’s analytics department, Batson said. Factors considered important were communication skills; a comfort dealing with the media, sponsors and fans; a history of winning in different environments; and an ability to be flexible strategically.

That last factor was especially key since many of the names on the list of candidates were club coaches who, with a national team, no longer could go out and buy players who fit their preferred style.

“For a national team,” Batson said, “you have the player[s] that you have. There’s a finite pool.”

Within a few weeks the search process guided the federation to Pochettino, who had won three trophies in 18 months as manager at PSG sandwiched between stints with Tottenham and Chelsea in the English Premier League. Almost as important was the fact Pochettino’s 17 months at Southampton overlapped with Crocker’s time there as technical director, giving the search party additional insight into how the coach works and allowing Crocker to reach out to Pochettino directly.

The next obstacle was getting the 52-year-old signed. He parted ways with Chelsea in May, halfway through a two-year contract reportedly worth more than $26 million. In three of his last four coaching jobs, Pochettino lasted less than two seasons, but what complicated his departure from Chelsea was a buyout clause calling for him and his coaches — most of whom followed him to the U.S. — to forfeit much of their salary if they accepted another coaching position.

It took U.S. Soccer, Chelsea and the coach time to find a solution that wouldn’t cost Pochettino the full $13 million he was owed before they could address the next question: How much could U.S. Soccer afford to pay him? Jurgen Klinsmann was the highest-paid coach in U.S. Soccer history when he made $3.2 million in 2014, almost a million more than Berhalter was paid in 2022.

Pochettino made nearly four times that in his only season at Chelsea. To close that gap, U.S. Soccer sought help, funding what is reported to be a two-year, $12-million deal with donations from hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, Diameter Capital co-founder Scott Goodwin and others.

“Folks reached out and said, ‘Hey, we want to support,” Batson said. “We had commercial partners, we had donors, other stakeholders saying, ‘Whatever you need.’”

Less than a week into the job, the new coach already is making an impact.

“You can just see the buzz and the excitement,” midfielder Brenden Aaronson said.

Whether that translates to results could take some time to answer, however.

“Our first camp is about getting to know each other,” Pochettino said Friday in a 30-minute meeting with about 50 journalists in which he answered questions in English and Spanish. “To settle the way that we want to work is the most important thing. We need to give time to the team to adapt to us. We are so, so happy with our decision to come here. The challenge to create a team, to know each other, is from today to until the World Cup.”