DANA POINT, Calif. – On a postcard-perfect evening in Southern California, U.S. men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino sat in a temporary but polished office inside the team hotel. Behind him, a wall carried motivational lines written in his own hand, surrounding a large sign with the words, “Why Not Us?” — the squad’s rallying cry for this summer’s World Cup. A lightly scented candle burned nearby, Colombia’s match against DR Congo played on a big screen, and a bowl of vivid yellow lemons popped against a room styled mostly in red and blue. From the balcony, Salt Creek Beach stretched into view just before sunset. Nearly a month after the USMNT moved into their base for the opening phase of the World Cup, one detail had clearly captured Pochettino’s curiosity.
“It’s crazy,” he said of the surfers he sees from his office day after day. “Five o’clock, they are there – in the morning, during the whole day and then perfecto, yes … It’s 24 hours, people there doing surf[ing]. It’s crazy. It’s a little bit boring, no? They are waiting, waiting [for] the perfect wave but it never arrives.”
For USMNT supporters, patience has also been essential since Pochettino took charge in the fall of 2024. The path toward a home World Cup has been marked by setbacks, questions and uneven progress, with that elusive perfect wave often nowhere in sight. Now, however, it may finally have arrived at exactly the right time. The U.S. entered this tournament with lofty ambitions on home soil and has so far backed them up, opening Group D with convincing victories over Paraguay and Australia. With the group already secured before the final matchday, the team has begun to show it can meet the moment after months of anticipation.
Through two matches, the World Cup has provided early evidence that Pochettino’s approach is taking hold. Players have described a period of adjustment to his tactical demands, particularly within a flexible, attack-driven system that appears to be clicking when it matters most. Still, Pochettino acknowledged that the adaptation process was not limited to the squad. He and his staff, he said, faced their own steep learning curve.
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“We were so naive when we signed our contract. I don’t know if I can explain,” he said Tuesday. “We misjudged the situation. It was worse than we really believed because we were so excited, because we explained to the players from day one when we signed, we said it’s the World Cup … It was with too much energy and then when we arrived here, we received a big bang, punch and we were knocked out for a while. We said, ‘What the f—?’”
Pochettino has frequently drawn a distinction between the player pool he first encountered and the group he ultimately brought to the World Cup, and that contrast goes beyond the arrival of several new faces. He and his staff sensed a gap between their own urgency and the mindset of players who, in his view, had not yet fully shifted into World Cup mode. Back-to-back Concacaf Nations League final defeats in March 2025, against Panama and Canada, only underscored how much work remained.
“That punch, we expected,” he said of those losses to Panama and Canada. “That was more than [a] surprise [to] us. I think it was more of a plan to have this punch that was painful but necessary [for] the people to realize in which place we were, even for the players to recognize in this way, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to arrive in a good position to the World Cup.”
It all began to click afterwards, slowly but surely. Their weeks-long journey to the Concacaf Gold Cup final a year ago was a turning point while subsequent friendlies allowed the USMNT to end 2025 on a five-game unbeaten run. It was in a meeting in November, sandwiched somewhere in between friendly wins against Paraguay and Uruguay, where Pochettino unintentionally broke out the team’s World Cup motto – “Why not us?”
“I said, ‘You are listening to me?'” he recounted. “I said, in 2002 when I was involved in the World Cup, South Korea was in the semifinals. Morocco was, also, in Qatar. Why not us? [We] can be that team that no one believed and get [to] that stage? … It was not that I prepared that. It was in this moment — when I talk, I never prepare [for] the meetings. Of course, I prepare in my mental way but [in] the end, it’s more intuition or feelings or emotion.”
Even before the Group D finale, Pochettino was taking a victory lap of sorts. Many of his calculations turned out to be astute ones but the elite tactician has slipped into the vibes guy role and he continues to attribute any success he and his players enjoy to mentality and emotion, appropriate for someone who has a handwritten book photocopied into a book about him that ends with him arguing that soccer is “a context of emotions.” As much as he needed to trust the talent pool, Pochettino admitted that the trust had to be reciprocal.
“Always, it’s a process,” he said. “You are going to check me, the players are seeing how we are in every single small situation and the player — how I treat him, how I talk with the team, how I talk with the kit man, how I talk in the morning with the chef. If you say, ‘Believe in me, I am a good guy,’ but after I treat people in a wrong way — they are so intelligent and [will] say, ‘This guy thinks that we are stupid.’ Also the problem was [to] prove [to] the players, all the players, 75 players and everything, that they can trust in us and they have our respect.”
His decisions are often colored by his own experience at the World Cup as a player, his one and only trip before hanging up the cleats, though he admitted on Tuesday that the two trips were not created equal.
“I was so nervous when I was a player,” he said. “I played in Japan against Nigeria with Argentina. I was so nervous. It was difficult to sleep the night before. It was so difficult but now it was the opposite. Before our first game, I feel so confident because I said, the players, they are going to perform. We were talking. We are so relaxed because when you feel that the energy is good, it’s right, everything is perfect. They say, no doubt they are going to perform.”
His conviction before the 4-1 win over Paraguay was correct, Pochettino now likely targeting a deeper run that most of his predecessors have missed out on, the U.S. team failing to reach the quarterfinals of the World Cup since 2002. It may have some people wondering if he will extend his current deal with U.S. Soccer, his contract up once the World Cup is over. U.S. Soccer CEO J.T. Batson gave him the sales pitch days before the USMNT’s World Cup roster reveal in New York but Pochettino danced around the issue on Tuesday.
“I think it’s good that It’s now focused, focusing on the World Cup and then if we want to stay, we have months to talk or days, or weeks because it’s four years until the next World Cup, no?” he said, his cards close to his chest.
There are things about the U.S., though, he has become enamored with. He brought a cowboy hat from the rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas to his office in the U.S. Soccer National Training Center in Georgia, a year before Sweden coach Graham Potter went viral for doing the same thing. Pochettino, though, has taken plenty from American culture.
“You go to, I don’t know, someplace like Nashville and you go to a bar and if you are alone, you make friends so quick and it looks like you, in a few minutes, belong in that place and when you go around America, that for me was a massive surprise,” he said.
The music tastes, meanwhile, have been eclectic – and appropriate as he is the newest Lainey Wilson fan, who he caught on Yellowstone, and as he works on learning the lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the USMNT’s unofficial World Cup anthem.
“I like country music now,” he said. “We are very fond of country music. Also, Teddy Swims. I really love Teddy Swims. “Bad Dreams” … Ella Langley, but she was with the British guys.”
He is also happy to clear up certain misconceptions about the nation as a whole.
“People say, ‘Americans have no healthy food. Yes, you have healthy food but also you have the food,” he said. “Chick-fil-A. It’s amazing, no? Chick-fil-A, but you go to Whole Foods. You have organic, this, that. You have everything here. That country is massive and the people are so good. I think we learned a lot. I think we are much better people now, knowing that country and the culture of the people here.”
